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Description: Where do our images about early hominids come from? In this fascinating in-depth study, David Van Reybrouck demonstrates how input from ethnography and primatology has deeply influenced our visions...

Where do our images about early hominids come from? In this fascinating in-depth study, David Van Reybrouck demonstrates how input from ethnography and primatology has deeply influenced our visions about the past from the 19th century to this day. Overviewing two centuries of intellectual debate in fields as diverse as archaeology, ethnography and primatology, Van Reybrouck’s book is one long plea for trying to understand the past on its own terms, rather than as facile projections from the present.

From Primitives to Primates

Overviewing two centuries of intellectual debate in fields as diverse as archaeology,
ethnography and primatology, Van Reybrouck’s book is one long plea for
understanding the past on its own terms, rather than as facile projections from
the present.
David Van Reybrouck (Bruges, 1971) was trained as an archaeologist at the
universities of Leuven, Cambridge and Leiden. Before becoming a highly successful
literary author (The Plague, Mission, Congo…), he worked as a historian of ideas.
For more than twelve years, he was coeditor of Archaeological Dialogues. In 2011-12,
he held the prestigious Cleveringa Chair at the University of Leiden.

Sidestone Press
ISBN: 978-90-8890-095-2

Bestelnummer: SSP123710001

Artikelnummer: SSP123710001

9 789088 900952

Sidestone

ISBN 978-90-8890-095-2

From Primitives
to Primates
A history of ethnographic and

From primitives to primates

A truly interdisciplinary study, this work shows how scholars working in different
fields can effectively improve their methods for interpreting the deep past by
understanding the historical challenges of adjacent disciplines.

Van Reybrouck

Where do our images of early hominids come from? In this fascinating in-depth
study, David Van Reybrouck demonstrates how input from ethnography and
primatology has deeply influenced our visions about the past from the 19th century
to this day – often far beyond the available evidence. Victorian scholars were keen
to look at contemporary Australian and Tasmanian aboriginals to understand the
enigmatic Neanderthal fossils. Likewise, today’s primatologists debate to what
extent bonobos, baboons or chimps may be regarded as stand-ins for early human
ancestors. The belief that the contemporary world provides ‘living links’ still
goes strong. Such primate models, Van Reybrouck argues, continue the highly
problematic ‘comparative method’ of the Victorian times. He goes on to show
how the field of ethnoarchaeology has succeeded in circumventing the major
pitfalls of such analogical reasoning.

David Van Reybrouck

primatological analogies in the
study of prehistory

*

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From Primitives
to Primates

Sidestone Press

David Van Reybrouck

From Primitives
to Primates
A history of ethnographic and
primatological analogies in the
study of prehistory

The dormancy of ethnographic analogy
Innovations in the Interbellum
Marxism and folklore
Postwar pessimism in Britain
The situation in the United States
Cultural continuity

95
97
101
105
112
114

The dilemma of the New Archaeology
The new analogy and the New Archaeology
Fieldwork and cautionary tales
Hypothetico-deductive reasoning or the benefits of testing
Between critique and inspiration

115
115
120
124
128

The heyday of ethnoarchaeology
The impossibility of independent testing
A thriving subdiscipline
Beyond analogy?
Place and population: a case study
Source and subject-side strategies

129
130
135
138
145
154

Decline and fall of ethnoarchaeology
The isolation of hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeology
Anthropological doubts about hunter-gatherers
Contextual ethnoarchaeology
Post-processual archaeology
An age of extremes

157
158
163
165
175
185

Conclusion
The strength of ethnoarchaeological analogies
Optimism, pessimism and the redundancy of analogy

186
188
192

4 Primate models
The idea of a primate model
First episode: from primate anatomy to human anatomy
Second episode: from living to fossil anatomy

195
195
197
200

Third episode: from primate behaviour to human behaviour
Fourth episode: from primate behaviour to early human behaviour
Converging circumstances

Primate modelling and the comparative method
Proximity, privilege, projection and paradoxes
Differences
Similarity but no continuity

312
312
316
317

Conclusion

321

Epilogue

329

References

331

Curriculum Vitae

373

Preface
‘Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have,’ said
the eighteenth-century moralist Samuel Johnson. This may be slightly frustrating
for those who want to use analogy, for historians of science it makes analogical
reasoning an interesting topic for research. Indeed, if analogy really oscillates between being helpful and being tricky; a history of analogy use in a specific discipline should become an exciting exercise.
Exciting this work has certainly been. During the years I have been working on
this topic, my fascination for the ways by which new insights are crafted through
parallels with other domains has rarely decreased. In a sense, analogical reasoning shows science from its most creative and artistic side. This is especially true
for disciplines like prehistoric archaeology, primatology and human origin studies
where it is often indispensable to make innovative claims about the remote past.
I, therefore, hope that some of my personal enthusiasm about this topic and the
pleasure I have experienced while studying it may transpire through the pages of
the present study.
A text which attributes so much importance to the role of external sources in
the construction of scientific knowledge cannot claim much autonomy of its own.
Nor do I wish to do so. Instead, during the past years I have had the pleasure to
work with a number of people who have helped me in one way or another. Wil
Roebroeks’ often impulsive criticism was counterbalanced by his impulsive enthusiasm; I have learnt from both. Raymond Corbey drew my attention to debates in
the field of primatology. I got interested in them, much more than I would have
thought possible. The participants in the Leiden Pioneer Project ‘Changing Views
on Ice Age Foragers’ constantly reminded me of the difficulty of cross-disciplinary
research, an invaluable insight when discussing the history of human origin studies. Olga Yates, the project’s secretary, was a constant source of well-disposed helpfulness whose acute sense of wit made the profession quite enjoyable indeed.
Many scholars in the Netherlands and abroad have granted me the opportunity to discuss and exchange ideas, either ‘live’ or via e-mail. This has really improved my understanding of fields like history of science and primatology and I
have expressed my sincere gratitude for their generosity to each of them. During
my research, I was quite fortunate to get in contact with a group of primatologists
related to the University of Antwerp and the Antwerp and Planckendael zoos.
Linda Van Elsacker, Jef Dupain, Hilde Vervaecke, Ellen Van Krunkelsven and several others proved inspiring discussion partners whose interest has not ceased to
surprise me. To Hilde, in particular, I am much indebted for organizing a wintry
weekend in her country house in the Belgian Ardennes where, entrapped by snow
and surrounded by bisons, a dozen of primatologists took the effort to discuss my
chapter 4. It was one of the most stimulating moments of this research project.
Receiving comments on draft versions of the chapters has been an invaluable
help to improve my text. Chapter 1 was read and commented upon by Jan Kolen
and Peter van Dommelen. Ton Lemaire and Wiktor Stoczkowski gave useful feedback on chapter 2, whereas John Bintliff, Peter van Dommelen and Alexander

preface

Gramsch advised me on how to improve chapter 3 or parts of it. Chapter 4 received not only valuable criticism from the ‘Planckendael gang’; Karen Strier also
provided very constructive comments on the section related to the baboon model
and with Jeanne Sept I had the opportunity to discuss the part on ethoarchaeology and the crisis of traditional modelling. Nathan Schlanger was brave enough
to work his way through the entire manuscript and to spend an afternoon in the
Jardin du Luxembourg discussing many aspects—I am much obliged to him for
that. My English, finally, was checked by Karen Waugh.
On several occasions I was given the opportunity to exchange my ideas with
students during lectures or seminars. In particular I would like to thank the participants and organisers of the master’s course on primatology in Antwerp and the
doctoral course ‘Archeologie en Antropologie’ in Leiden. Lecturing gives one the
pleasant illusion that one’s ideas finally belong to Knowledge; fortunately, students are there to question that.
I am also indebted to my former colleagues in AREA, the European research
network on the archives of archaeology, for allowing me to occasionally escape
the duties of scientific coordination in order to finish my PhD. Alain Schnapp
and Sander van der Leeuw were not just understanding but even encouraging in
that respect. Marianne De Baere at De Morgen also learnt to live with a free-lance
writer who was ‘nearly ready’ with his thesis ‘but not quite yet.’
The first letter I received in my pigeon-hole after moving from Cambridge to
Leiden was an invitation to join the editorial board of Archaeological Dialogues.
This was six years ago and I am still a member of it. It is hard to express my sense
of elation about having been able to work and to continue to work with such an
inspiring and truly generous group of people. My doctoral research and indeed my
entire stay in the Netherlands would have been very different without the ongoing discussions and personal support of my fellow-editors: Peter van Dommelen,
Jan Kolen, Jos Bazelmans, Jan Slofstra, and since recently, David Fontijn and
Fokke Gerritsen. Apart from intellectual exchanges, they have also assured me of
a number of agreeable excursions and memorable nights.
Some people do not clearly fit any of the above categories and have nonetheless contributed, one way or another, to my work. I am indebted for enriching
conversations to Dirk Jacobs, Marc De Bie, Paul Treherne, Christophe Abegg,
Alexander Verpoorte, David Fontijn, Kaat Wils, and Froukje Slofstra. My parents
and my brother have followed this doctoral research from a discrete distance, often wondering what it was all about and why it had to take so long. I felt nonetheless supported by their silent trust. My friends in Belgium and beyond allowed
me to escape the worlds of reading and writing for a day of cycling, an evening for
cards or a night of talking—they don’t realize how much I appreciated this. Dieke
Wesselingh was there all along, and still is, even now that the shackles are shed.
Finally, most of this text was written after my first skiing holiday where I lost
five very dear friends in the Cavalese gondola accident. I would like to thank my
friends, dead or alive, for permanently reminding me of the value of friendship.
The palm grows under pressure.
Brussels-Leiden, October 2000
10

from primitives to primates

Introduction
It was a pleasant morning when the Albertville moored in the port of Antwerp on the
27th of June 1897. The night before there had been excessive rainfall and a thunderstorm at four o’clock in the morning was described as ‘unforgettable’. Large parts of
the province of Antwerp were inundated and in the morning the temperature rose to
15 degrees Celsius. Aboard the ocean steamer, nearly three hundred Congolese were
wrapped in woollen cloths, their heads enveloped with shawls. They had come all the
way from the Free State of Congo, the private property of the Belgian king Leopold
II. The monarch wanted them to be displayed at his colonial exhibition in Tervuren,
near Brussels. There were well over a hundred soldiers and musicians, 93 Bangala,
27 Mayombe, 12 Basoko and two pygmies. For two months they occupied the bamboo
huts near the pond in the park, paddled in their canoes and broiled their food. As
icons of Africa’s savagery and excuses for the king’s relentless exploitation and missionary conversion, they played at being themselves before the curious and bewildered eyes
of Belgian citizens.
The Tervuren colonial exhibition welcomed more than one million visitors, an astronomical figure even by modern standards. The Congolese villages served as the fair’s
principal attraction. Whereas July had eventually become warm and pleasant, August
was wet and cold. Seven of the exhibited natives died of influenza; their sober graves
are still to be seen at the Tervuren churchyard today. Due to the unusual rainfall, the
path which led the visitors along the villages—they were not allowed to enter the settlements—had become so muddy that a ramp had to be constructed. The country’s
Francophone noblemen, their elegant but appalled wives, the nouveaux riches from
the urban and industrial elite, the gangs of mocking children, the mumbling priests,
the farmers and the workmen with their raw Flemish laughter, all these visitors could
literally look down on the miserable creatures from the heart of Africa. All summer
long, articles in the national press on the Congolese stressed their absence of civilization, their lack of religion, and their inclination towards cannibalism. Their smiles
were called ‘simian’, their aspects ‘hideous’, their blood ‘boiling’. ‘This is the famous
“civilization” of the negroes! And these here were even selected! Eh bien, merci...’
Another reporter wondered how it was possible that people who had been brought by
Christians to a Christian country still lived ‘in the darkness of the rudest fetishism’.
One journalist even warned against the fraternal exchange of blood with blacks which
might invoke cannibalism: one individual who was said to have done so, had already
bitten his mother-in-law when she climbed the stairs and he had devoured the flesh
‘comme un orateur socialiste’.
Interestingly, the epithets used to stigmatize the Congolese natives—lack of reason,
ugliness, bru­tality—were the very same applied to prehistoric savages which archaeologists had begun to unearth. The pygmy and the Neanderthal both evoked the same
strange mixture of curiosity and repulsion. In an exhibition where the triumph of
Western progress and the propaganda for white supremacy was so unabashed, the representations of the primitive Congolese echoed the discourse on our primeval ancestors.
Were those exotic exemplars of the human race not comparable to the savages which

introduction

had once roamed the Belgian Ardennes? Had the cave site of Spy not furnished us, less
than ten years ago, with two fossil human skeletons with equally protruding faces? Had
the valleys of the rivers Meuse and Lesse not yielded numerous simple implements of
prehistoric cave-dwellers? Perhaps the association was not literally made, but the surrounding discourses on primitivity and the representations of the others’ wildness were
convergent. Looking down from the ramp on the primitive tools the ‘Basoko’ and the
‘Bangala’ used, on their prognathous faces and their thick, curly hair, on the sagging
breasts of the half-naked women, hearing the coarse and dark sounds of the cries they
howled at each other, smelling the mud, the rotten reed, the fires and the scorched
meat, more than one visitor of this exotic circus could have assented to Darwin’s words
when he first encountered the Fuegians: ‘Such were our ancestors.’
After the exhibition was over, the site assumed again its rural Brabant aspect—but
not for long. King Leopold decided to erect a permanent museum on the spot and
Charles Girault, architect of the Petit Palais in Paris, designed a magnificent, if somewhat pompous, neo-classicist building with a garden inspired by Versailles. The complex was inaugurated in 1910, shortly after the king’s death and shortly after Congo
had become a Belgian colony. Once the stage of exotic scenes, Tervuren now became
home to a ponderous bastion of colonial learning: the Congo museum. In the first half
of the century, until Congo’s independence in 1960, the museum made gigantic acquisitions, rendering it one of the world’s richest collections on Africa to date. Thousands
and thousands of beetles, stuffed mammals, rock samples and exotic seeds entered the
museum gates, along with a titanic dug-out canoe, superb masks, wooden sculptures,
and ritual garments. Natural history and cultural history, taxidermy and ethnography,
wildlife and primitive life went hand in hand in this epitome of colonial ordering and
mastery.
The collections were so abundant that several new zoological species were described
on the basis of them. These were not the least of animals but impressive creatures like
the bright Congo peacock and the elusive okapi. On a late afternoon in 1928, the
American primate anatomist Harold Coolidge, touring along European museum collections, picked up from a storage tray in Tervuren a skull which looked like a juvenile
chimpanzee. He noted, however, that the epiphyses were fused, so that the animal must
have been adult. Remembering the great differences he had seen between the two living
pet chimps in the house of American psychologist Robert Yerkes, he started to wonder
whether there was really just one species of chimpanzee. That very afternoon, just before closing time, Coolidge expressed his doubts to Henri Schouteden, the then museum
director, who two weeks later spoke about it with Ernst Schwarz, a German anatomist. Schwarz was most intrigued, took some measurements on one skull and rapidly
drafted together a paper, claiming that we were faced with a distinct subspecies of
chimpanzees, the pygmy chimpanzee or Pan satyrus paniscus. In 1933, Coolidge took
revenge for this scientific theft and published a fuller description of the animal, which
he raised to the species level, Pan paniscus, the animal we now refer to as the bonobo.
Fraudulence and rivalry laid thus at the discovery of the species which eventually appeared to be the most peaceful of all great apes.

from primitives to primates

Although the discovery of the bonobo was one of the last and most spectacular
attainments in mammalian zoology, the skeletons and type specimens in Tervuren
remained virtually untouched for nearly half a century. In the summer of 1973,
Adrienne Zihlman and Douglas Cramer, two American physical anthropologists with
a strong interest in human evolution, came to Tervuren to study the bonobo bones
again. Eighteen skeletons were retrieved from the shelves and they were measured in
all possible ways. Zihlman, who strongly took part in the 1970s feminist movement,
sought to replace the androcentric, baboon-inspired, Man the Hunter scenario of human evolution with a narrative that accorded a more active role to females. Longtime defending the common chimpanzee as the best alternative ancestral prototype, she
started to replace it by the bonobo after she realized that sexual dimorphism was much
smaller among bonobos than among chimps. Female and male bonobos were each other’s equals, at least in anatomical respect. The skulls and skeletons kept in Tervuren
were therefore not just interesting in their own right but echoed, she urged, australopithecine anatomy of several million years ago.
But not everyone agreed. Another American anatomist, Henry McHenry run his
callipers and tape measure along the same morphological evidence when he was a visiting scholar in Tervuren some years later. Taking over 20,000 measurements, he strongly objected to the idea that the bonobo was more than any other primate privileged in
clarifying our evolutionary past. On top of that, less than twenty-five kilometres north
of Tervuren, in the Planckendael Zoo near Mechelen, behavioural studies on captive
bonobos started to be undertaken from the late 1980s onwards. Whereas the spaciously
housed Planckendael community grew into the world’s largest social group of bonobos
in captivity, primatologists who studied them refrained from drawing all too easy inferences on human evolution. Bonobos were no living fossils.
Back in Tervuren, Francis Van Noten, curator of the prehistory and archaeology
section of the museum and professor at the Catholic University of Leuven worked on
African and European prehistory. He received international acclaim through his excavations of the Epipalaeolithic settlement of Meer in Northern Belgium which set
a new standard for analysing and interpreting seemingly poor sites from the sandy
regions. Though only stone chips and flakes were recovered (all organic material had
disappeared), the creative integration of micro-topographic studies, refitting and usewear analysis allowed to obtain a fuller picture of the people at the very end of the Ice
Age. That picture was like an ethnographic snapshot of the past—Van Noten literally
named it ‘palaeoethnography’. However, explicit ethnographic parallels were avoided
throughout, despite Van Noten’s profession in an ethnographic museum, his position
in the department of anthropology in Leuven, his travels in the Kalahari, and his
archaeological fieldwork in Bantu Africa. Even if the excavated evidence was scant,
ethnography was not explicitly invoked as a source of information. Though the experience with the !Kung might have coloured Van Noten’s vision, he ostensibly avoided
the crafting of such analogies: ‘Ethnographic parallels can only be drawn when there is
historical continuity between what you excavate and what is still alive; contemporary
Bushmen can only tell you about earlier Bushmen but that’s it,’ he told his students in

introduction

Leuven—myself being one of them. In the late twentieth century, ethnographic analogies had to be applied with much more rigour than most visitors to the colonial exhibition ever assumed.
Let us retreat from this narrative. This is not a history of the Tervuren museum
after all, no matter how much such a study deserves to be written (but see Luwel
1960; Wynants 1997). The history of Belgian institutions, and even of Belgian
science in general, is not the scope of this book. If I present such sketches from the
museum’s centennial existence, it is because, more than any other place I know, it
has been an exemplary locus of the changing discourses on primitives and primates
that I wish to study. The late nineteenth-century belief in contemporary savages
as living ancestors, the growing interest for great apes during the Interbellum, the
quest in postwar primatology for the extant species which gave the best hominid
model, the recent critique of such modelling exercise, and the distrust of straight­
forward ethnographic parallels in modern archaeology, all these ideas, at some
point, were articulated in Tervuren. From the spectacle of Congolese savagery to
the silent measurement of dusty bones, these ideas centre on one theme: what are
legitimate sources for enhancing our image of prehistoric humanity?
Archaeological and palaeoanthropological data are almost by definition imperfect. Even if depositional conditions were always mint, excavations exhaustive,
and hominid fossils abundant, in such empirical Walhalla the data would still be
insufficient to answer all our questions. Archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists
wish to reconstruct past behav­iour—in the widest sense of the term: from early
hominid locomotion to Upper Palaeolithic rituals—and it is a truism to state that
behaviour itself does not fossilize. There is, therefore, an important epistemological gap between the formal object of the disciplines (reconstruc­tion of behaviour)
and their material object (material culture, fossils). As a corollary, archaeologi

More details to this historical sketch can be found in a range of publications. On Tervuren and
the colonial exhibition, see Luwel (1960), Van Reybrouck (1997a) and especially Wynants (1997:
119-128, 157-161). The illustrations in the latter are particularly evocative: my description of the
arrival of the Congolese in Antwerp is based on a press drawing by Gailliard (Wynants 1997: 121);
the portrayal of life during the exhibition used historical photographs (Wynants 1997: 122-5); and
the quotes came from press articles published in Le National (7 and 12 June 1897) and La Gazette
(9 June 1897), copies of which were generously given by Maurits Wynants whom I want to thank
for several discussions and unlimited exchange of information. The weather report at the day of the
arrival was provided by the climatological service of the Royal Meteorological Institute of Uccle
in Belgium (letter 24 November 1999; ref. Clim/Fax/99377); a description of the thunderstorm
and inundations appeared in Ciel et Terre (1897: 255). Darwin’s famous line about the Fuegians
comes from the Descent of Man (1871: II, 404). On the discovery of the bonobo, see Coolidge
(1984) and Van den Audenaerde (1984), and of course the original publications (Schwarz 1929 and
Coolidge 1933). More recent studies on the Tervuren collection of bonobos include Zihlman and
Cramer (1978) and McHenry (1984), see also Haraway (1989: 340). On bonobos in captivity and
behavioural studies on them, see De Bois and Van Puijenbroeck (1993). The excavations of Meer
were published by Van Noten (1978) and are described by Renfrew and Bahn (1991: 280-1).
References in the text always give the original date of publication. Quotes are generally from first
editions or original publications, unless otherwise stated between brackets in the list of references.
To avoid the ponderous term ‘nonhuman primates’, monkeys and apes will often be designated simply as
‘primates’ as opposed to ‘humans’. Of course, this is not to deny that humans are also primates, but a succinct terminology which is easily understood seems far more preferable than a cumbersome taxonomically
and politically correct jargon.

from primitives to primates

cal and palaeoanthropological interpretations are always underdetermined by the
data; a leap must be made to cross the gap between what we see and what we
say. It is here that the use of external sources becomes of paramount importance.
Analogies, parallels, comparisons, models, and metaphors are all devices which
purport to bridge the gap. In general, the procedure is to invoke a more familiar instance to clarify one which is less familiar to us. In historical sciences like
archaeology, palaeoanthropology and also geology, this comes mostly down to
looking at the present where processes are still at work to explain the past where
we find only mute patterns, the result of such processes. Analogies thus explain
the unknown in terms of the known, the past patterns in terms of the present
processes. Analogies are powerful instruments to disentangle complex problems,
but risk to obfuscate the original issue when it is substituted by the more familiar
instance. Whereas a certain amount of analogical reasoning is useful, too much
reliance on it can blur the issue.
Two external sources have been of crucial importance in the study of prehistoric behaviour: contemporary ‘primitives’ and extant primates. The former were
intensively tapped in the Victorian anthropology of the second half of the nineteenth century and continue to be so, though in a very modified form, in modern
Anglo-American ethnoarchaeology; the latter became more prominent in NorthAmerican primatology after the Second World War. The contributions of primitives and primates to the image of human prehistory and evolution are so essential
that it is surprising no one has undertaken a serious study of them. Indeed, the influential American primatologist Linda M. Fedigan once remarked that ‘a discussion of the proper use of analogy in natural and social science might be useful in
the context of human evolution theories’ (1986: 45) but regretted that it was not
yet done. Beyond this weak statement, nothing of the sort has been formulated.
The present work attempts to fill that void.
By analysing key texts from the history of anthropology, archaeology, and
primatol­ogy and subjecting them to a logical reading grid, this work seeks to
study the way analogies from primitives and primates have been used during the
last two centuries to elucidate human prehistory. More precisely, I want to investigate which sources were selected, how the analogies were made, how they were
defended and how they were strengthened. My interest is first and foremost in the
structure of analogies, less in their outcome. By drawing on recent insights from
inductive logic, philosophy of science and cognitive psychology, I shall attempt to
analyse the argumentative mechanisms underlying both primate models and ethnographic parallels. I focus on three debates: the one surrounding the comparative
method of Victorian anthropology, the one dealing with modern ethnoarchaeology and the one on the postwar use of behavioural primate models. The emphasis
is on Anglo-American science where these issues have been elaborately debated.
This is not to belittle the importance of the continental tradition; but its often autonomous and different development simply falls beyond the range of this work.
Perhaps I should specify further what this work will not embark upon.
Obviously, my aim is not to find ‘correct analogies’ for deducing how early hominids behaved, how Neanderthals looked like and what Magdalenian rock art

introduction

meant. Though not entirely detached from current debates in archaeology and
palaeoanthropology, such substantial themes are beyond the scope of this study.
In a sense, my interest has been more in prehistorians and primatologists than
in prehistory and primates. However, if I took some distance towards ‘real’ archaeology in order to study its history, the present work does not belong to ‘classical’ history of science either. Whereas proper historians of science, generally
speaking, study scientific ideas by contextualizing them in their particular social,
institutional, biographical, political and ideological settings, I have often been
consciously decontextualizing historical statements in order to make their logical
structure comparable across the ages. Though I have situated historical debates
within their respective polemical contexts (which is a sine qua non for any understanding), ultimately my aim was to compare their argumentative skeleton with
debates from other periods. The frame of reference relied upon here was thus not
one of strict synchronous contexts but of diachronic structures: rather than studying thin time-slices of the history of science, my temporal horizon was broader
(and, by definition, coarser) than many historians would permit. More a conceptual than a contextual historiography, my work is somehow related to the discipline of history of ideas in the sense it was inaugurated by Arthur O. Lovejoy in
the 1930s (Lovejoy 1936; 1938). Indeed, the long-term perspective and the search
for transhistorical recurrences echo the approach Lovejoy c.s. followed (Wilson
1987; Oakley 1987; Kelley 1990). Yet mine is still not a case-study in the history
of ideas. Its traditional stress on relatively immutable unit-ideas which are transmitted from generation to generation contrasts with my focus on the bricolage
of analogical reasoning where time and again inferences have to be invented and
defended. This, then, as will become clear, is a history of arguments. In touch
with (but distinct from) the sciences it studies, from history of science and from
history of ideas, it attempts to unravel the procedures by which inferences and
ideas are crafted.
The perspective taken should be further delineated. My uneasy relation with
traditional history of science stems from a debate which has been going on in the
history of human evolution studies over the last decade (Van Reybrouck 2000, in
press). Apart from studies undertaken by classical historians of science (cf. Bowler
1986; Theunissen 1989), the 1990s have witnessed the emergence of an alternative form of historiography written by scholars who are more involved with current debates in archaeology and palaeoanthropology (Landau 1991; Stoczkowski
1994). The differences between these histories are rather impressive. Whereas the
former focus on the detached study of short-term scientific contexts, the latter
are often committed to demonstrating how pre-scientific, mythical and narrative
forms from the past still affect contemporary science. It is a matter of synchronous contexts against diachronic structures, of historicist methodology against
structuralist ontology, of neutral history of science against critical history of

Margaret Hodgen who studied Tylor’s doctrine of survivals (1937) coined the term ‘history of scientific method’, a term I feel sympathy with.

from primitives to primates

archaeology and anthropology. The whole debate pivots around the notion of
continuity. For ‘structuralist’ historians of science, continuity is the rule rather
than the exception; often similarity between two historical statements is enough
to infer continuity. According to them, scientific ideas must be seen as outcrops
of underlying, fairly immutable, long-term structures. For ‘classical’ historians
of science, each historical context is unique and must be understood in its own
terms; continuity with former periods will only be accepted if there is sufficient
evidence for direct transmission by intellectual borrowing, personal tutorship, institutional affinity and educational background. The confrontation on this interesting theme reached a tentative apex during the Does history matter? conference
held in Leiden in January 1997 (Corbey and Roebroeks 2000, in press; Bowler
2000, in press; Stoczkowski 2000, in press; Theunissen 2000, in press). The mutual criticisms were far from mild: classical historians reproached the structuralist
approach of undue century-hopping, of ripping sources out of their context, of
reading modern meaning into ancient texts; ‘structuralist’ historians decried the
temporal myopia, the short-term bigotry and contextual dogmatism of traditional
history of science. Rather than choosing sides for one of the camps, I believe that
there is some truth in both critiques. Studying long-term structures does indeed
require more methodological rigour than most structuralist historians have been
willing to admit, but this should not imply, as classical historians urge, that the
project must be abandoned as a whole in favour of only short-term perspectives.
The historicist method and structuralist question can be combined; in a recent paper on the meaning of bipedalism, Wiktor Stoczkowski (1995) has shown how an
interest for continuity can be fruitfully reconciled with an interest for discontinuity. My own position, therefore, stands midway between both paradigms. Whereas
my interest is in long-term structures, in continuity and in critical history, I have
not relied upon structuralist method because it runs too easily in the trap of
selective reading and because it often sees continuity when there is just similarity. Instead, my study of three debates (Victorian comparative method, modern
ethnoarchaeology, and postwar primate models) proceeds by a fairly traditional
historicist method of detailing the respective polemical contexts, after which I
move beyond the intricacies of the short term, to indicate and explain some of the
similarities and differences between the debates as long-term continuities, recurrences or discontinuities.
Another axis along which I should position myself concerns the issue of presentism versus historicism. More obsolete than the continuity-discontinuity debate, it still figures prominently in the history of archaeology (Fahnestock 1984;
McVicar 1984; Pinsky 1989; Van Reybrouck 1995; Gustafsson 1998; 1999; Jensen
1998). In 1968, George Stocking coined and defended the notion of historicism

It cannot be incidental that nearly all proponents of the continuity thesis share a background in
structuralist anthropology. Wiktor Stoczkowski came from Polish ethnography and prehistory and
used Lévi-Straussian methods in his analyses of hominization scenarios; Misia Landau, a palaeoanthropologist by training, drew on Russian formalism (especially Propp’s method of studying folk
tales) and to a lesser extent on French structuralism (like Greimas’ narratology; cf. Lewin 1997:
30-46). Others like Perper and Schrire (1977), Latour and Strum (1986) and Sahlins (1996) have
intellectual affinities with structuralist anthropology.

introduction

as the detached study of the disciplinary past, the study of the past for the sake
of the past that is typically undertaken by professional historians of science. He
argued that in the long run, such neutral attitude might be more beneficial to
contemporary issues in the field than an overtly presentist agenda of studying the
past for the sake of the present, a Whig historiography which is often characteristic for practising scientists-turned-historians (Stocking 1968a; Di Brizio 1995).
Ever since, presentism has become somewhat of an insult for practising scholars
with an interest in their discipline’s past. It should not be forgotten, however, that
at the time Stocking wrote his historicist defence, anthropology witnessed some of
the excesses of presentist historiography (Harris 1968). Neo-evolutionist scholars
were re-establishing links with the founding fathers of anthropology from the second half of the nineteenth century in ways which, in retrospect, seemed far more
rhetorical than historiographical. Stocking was right to repudiate the unabashed
judgmental attitude of their histories, their tendency to divide the past in winners
and losers, their wish to decide who was right and who was wrong. Yet the historicist alternative, on the other hand, turned out to be something of a positivist chimaera: a respectable ideal of intellectual neutrality which could never be reached
because of the theory-ladenness of observation. But should it be reached? Perhaps
not necessarily. It has been the great insight of hermeneutic philosophy and philosophy of science that being tied to your own time is not necessarily an inhibition
to understanding the past but also a condition of possibility. Gadamer stressed the
constitutive role of prejudices and Kuhn argued that a paradigm provided a vision
of the world. Present suppositions are often likened to a pair of spectacles which
colour and deform one’s vision—an unfortunate metaphor which apparently forgets that glasses make the world visible, albeit it in specific ways. In recent years,
therefore, people have urged for a critical history of science, a history which does
not deny its links with the present, which hopes to contribute to contemporary
debates not by applauding the present state of knowledge (like in the Whiggish
history) but by questioning and deconstructing it, by showing the contingencies
of what we now know, by indicating that our present understanding is as much
influenced by intellectual legacy as it is by empirical adequacy (Pinsky and Wylie
1989; Veit 1998). Such presentism is not history for the present but history of the
present, and sometimes even against it.
I feel sympathy with such a programme as it navigates between unattainable
objectivist pretensions and all too easy subjectivist agendas. Moreover, this ‘critical presentism’ also enabled me to find a place in the institutional context I have
been working in. As this Ph.D. research formed part of a larger project where
geologists, palaeontologists and ‘real’ archaeologists focused on the Palaeolithic

In archaeology at that time, the work of Glyn Daniel (1967) was not free from presentist underpinnings either. It described the history of archaeology as a ladder that had been ascended through time,
as a series of steps which cumulated in the present state of understanding (cf. Trigger 1985; Richard
1993; Veit 1998). He thus used modern theories as a yardstick with which to assess the relative
merits of previous interpretations.
In biology such a role for history has been already long-time acknowledged. Key participants in the
debate are often respected historians of their own discipline. The historiographical and biological
work of authors like E. Mayr and S.J. Gould are truly integrated.

from primitives to primates

occupation of Europe, I was constantly reminded of the relevance disciplinary
history could and should have on current themes. As an archaeologist working
on the history of his discipline, I had to satisfy myself with a somewhat ambiguous position: whereas I thought (and still think) that an awareness of the field’s
past is essential to any participation in contemporary debates, I did not regard
it the historian’s task to supply ready-made answers to the practising scientist. If
archaeology is like a game of football, I do not see myself as one of the players on
the field, nor do I long to be the trainer who shouts from the sideline. The role of
neutral referee or fanatic supporter appeal even less to me. If there is one person
I feel affinity with, it must be the commentator during an international match
who tries to be objective, while barely hiding his sympathies. Neither the field or
the sideline, nor the dugout or the stands but the press booth is the place for the
critical presentist.
Though the present work discusses themes as diverse as Faroer oil lamps, baboon
dentition and postmodernism in archaeology, this variety is bound together by a
comprehensive theme I came upon during my research. Having worked on ethnographic analogy in nineteenth-century Neanderthal research (Van Reybrouck
1994a) and being acquainted with some of the debates in ethnoarchaeology, a
repeated pattern struck me as I worked my way through the primatological literature. Primate models as they developed in the second half of the twentieth century
seemed often more closely akin to ethnographic parallels in Victorian anthropology than
to modern ethnoarchaeological analogies which explicitly moved beyond the confines
of the nineteenth-century comparative method. Indeed, chimpanzees sometimes appeared to be today’s Tasmanians. Both were used as living stand-ins for the remote
human past, as flesh and blood versions of the fossils excavated. My working hypothesis was that after the Second World War, the discourse on primitives would
have been displaced to the nonhuman primates so that modern primate models
came to echo the presuppositions of an earlier, anthropological tradition, whereas
ethnoarchaeology was precisely seeking procedures to circumvent the straightforward projections of this older anthropology.
This very simple hypothesis has rarely been hinted at before me, and even then
only in a cursory way. Donna Haraway’s monumental Primate Visions mentions
the ‘1950s relocation of discourse about primitivity onto monkeys and apes’ but
remains silent about the impact on analogical arguments (1989: 229). In 1993,
Sarah Lyon read a paper at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological
Association on the historical shift from an ethnographic other to a primate other,
arguing that ‘the ethnographic other never dies because all the other concepts are
kept implicitly alive in the primate other’ (1993: 385). The paper, however, was
never published. In her outstanding review of baboon studies, Susan Sperling
(1991: 11) wrote that ‘monkeys and apes were used explicitly as exemplars of
earlier stages of human evolution. The ubiquitous primate ancestral group now
occupied a position like that of “tribal societies” in the evolutionary schemas of

This was the Palaeolithic Pioneer Project ‘Changing Views of Ice Age Foragers’ at Leiden University
which received funding from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

introduction

nineteenth-century anthropologists.’ It is the most explicit reference I have found
to the working hypothesis I had coined. The present work, then, can be seen as
one long argument elaborating this point.
Chimpanzees are today’s Tasmanians. This is the central theme of the present
work and we might as well stop here, were it not that ‘history is that impossible
thing: the attempt to give an account, with incomplete knowledge, of actions
themselves undertaken with incomplete knowledge’ (Graham Swift, in his novel
Waterland). Simple and attractive though my working hypothesis seemed at first,
it dawned on me that historical reality was far more complex every time I got stuck
in some text which did not respond to my expectations. Initially I had the idea of
presenting an ideal-typical scheme of the analogies per debate (similarity-based,
formal analogy for the nineteenth-century comparative method; causality-based,
relational analogy for the twentieth-century ethnoarchaeology; and similaritybased, formal analogy for modern primate models devoid of the nineteenth-century hierarchy), but time and again I had to admit that half a century of discussion cannot be resumed under one such generalizing description. In particular, I
grew aware of the danger of stereotyping an entire controversy on the basis of its
most extreme utterances. Morgan and Sollas are indeed epitomes of evolutionist
reasoning, but the picture is much more subtle. Binford and Whitelaw do indeed
pinnacle ethnoarchaeology’s search for alternatives, but others were less outspoken. Tanner and Zihlman do exemplify the postwar quest for a primate model,
but not everybody has been so fanatical. For this reason I decided to describe each
debate first of all in its concrete polemical context rather than in abstract, idealtypical terms; only then could cross-disciplinary comparisons be made. Logical
simplicity thus made place for historical subtlety, which is a nice way of saying
that my argument became more muddled. A working hypothesis is no more than
this, something to work with. The moments I had to nuance my hypothesis, I felt
comforted by what Franz Boas once said on new ideas: ‘The invention is not difficult. Difficult is the retention and further development’ (1888: 638).
What does the further development of the argument look like? Chapter 1
provides the relevant theoretical and methodological instruments. Drawing upon
insights from inductive logic, philosophy of science and cognitive psychology, it
presents an idiom to talk about analogies as well as a method for studying them. It
argues that analogies are central to the practice of science, that they are not right
or wrong but more or less valid, and that there exist devices for strengthening
them. Somewhat technical in tone, the chapter introduces concepts and principles
which will be used throughout the subsequent chapters.
Chapter 2 takes us to Victorian anthropology and its use of ethnographic
parallels. The chapter places the development of its famous comparative method
against the background of the changing polemical contexts (such as the three-age
system, the antiquity of man, the degenerationist critique and the late-evolutionist fragmentation) and notes how the analogies were increasingly based on a narrow definition of similarity and became projections.

10

from primitives to primates

Chapter 3 shows how after a relative silence in the first half of the twentieth
century, ethnographic analogy emerged again as part of the New Archaeology. It
investigates how the resultant ethnoarchaeology attempted to move beyond the
comparative method and how the notion of analogy was thoroughly discussed.
The chapter also deals with ethnoarchaeology’s fall from grace in recent theoretical archaeology.
Chapter 4 is a study of the debate on primate modelling as it developed in
postwar primatology. It details why monkeys and apes were only recently drawn
on as sources for human behavioural evolution and how, from the 1960s onwards, scholars have been favouring baboons, social carnivores, geladas, chimps,
and bonobos as ‘best models’ for studying early hominids. Analysing the arguments put forward, it also explains the crisis of such referential modelling and the
alternatives it has given rise to recently.
Whereas the three preceding chapters can be read in their own right, Chapter 5
confronts them with each other. It demonstrates how ethnoarchaeological analogies and primate models, although contemporaneous, differ profoundly. It further
investigates the structural resemblance between the analogical reasoning of postwar primatology and Victorian anthropology.
The conclusion argues that the logical resemblance between the comparative
method and primate modelling is not so much due to a direct transfer of methods and procedures, but the result of a discursive continuity in the representation
of tribal societies and primate groups between the nineteenth and the twentieth
century. As a corollary, primitives have been replaced by primates as entities for
immediate and wholesale projections towards the distant human past.

introduction

11

Chapter 1

Analogies

Analogies in science
Nearly anyone who has ever studied physics will remember how the behaviour of
gases was presented with the example of permanently moving billiard balls. Just
like the red and white balls on a cloth, gas molecules were said to move randomly
through a finite space and the smaller this space was, the more frequent the collisions became, resulting in higher pressure. Pascal’s law was nothing else but a game
of pool. Examples like this permeate the practice of science and their visualizing
power makes them powerful devices in the transfer of otherwise abstract forms of
knowledge. The fact that many people still remember aspects of the kinetic theory
of gases, even long after they have given up studying physics, is perhaps the best
illustration of the pervasive nature of such models.
Apart from their didactic and mnemonic potential, models, metaphors and
analogies also serve as important heuristic devices in the discovery and elaboration of scientific theories. The history of science amply provides us with examples
such as Kekulé’s well-worn account of the discovery of the circular structure of
benzene after his dream of a snake biting its tail, Bohr’s discovery of the atomic
structure by analogy with the solar system, and Darwin’s discovery of natural
selection inspired by Malthus’ theory on human population growth (Holyoak
and Thagard 1995: 209). Here, the role of models is not merely confined to the
transfer and reproduction of scientific knowledge but plays an integral part in the
production of it. Cognitive psychologists have experimentally shown that people
will more easily solve an abstract problem if they can invoke an external analogous
model. In a classical experiment, students were asked to solve a medical problem
of how one can apply radiation to a malevolent tumour inside someone’s stomach
without the bundle of rays destroying the stomach tissue beyond repair. Only ten
percent of the students came up with the right solution: split up the rays and attack the tumour from different angles. In a next stage of the experiment, respond

There are as many definitions of analogy, model, and metaphor as there are students of them (Hesse
1966; Leatherdale 1974; Sapir 1977; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Holyoak and Thagard 1995).
Theories regarding metaphor have even been called ‘the Balkan of literary theory’ (Draaisma 1995:
19). This diversity has at least the advantage that one is free to develop a personal vocabulary. The
terms model and analogy are defined in the subsequent section with that title; the term metaphor
won’t figure prominently in the present work (not because it has little relevance, but because it
was rarely used in the historical debates I want to describe) although the philosophical discussion
between authors like Ricoeur and Derrida on its constructive or deconstructive role is closely associated with the debate on analogy.

analogies

13

ents were asked to read a story about a general who wanted his army to attack a
town that was surrounded by vast minefields. The general decided to divide his
army into smaller contingents which could cross the minefields and attack the
town from its different access roads. When students were told to use this story to
solve the tumour treatment problem, 75 percent succeeded in finding the right
solution. Clearly, the military analogue had helped them to solve the medical
problem (Holland et al. 1986: 289-96; Holyoak and Thagard 1995: 110-6).
Once the importance of analogies in reasoning is realized, the question shifts from
whether or not analogies are essential, that is, inextricably bound up with the process
of scientific growth. Whereas many would argue that models and analogies are only
temporarily useful devices which can be rejected once the theory is formulated, others
hold that they are permanently required in the practice of science (Wilson 1964; Hesse
1966: 1-56; Leatherdale 1974: 39-90; Stepan 1986). Freud elaborated an interesting intermediate position by saying that whereas particular metaphors might become redundant, each stage of scientific development still requires the invention of new metaphors
(Draaisma 1995: 16). If metaphors, models and analogies can be seen as tools, are they
tools of construction or tools of maintenance? Are they disposable tools or durable implements? Or is it still possible, as some would argue, to perform certain tasks with bare
hands? These questions are far from being resolved philosophically, but from the history
of science it is undeniable that models and analogies have been ubiquitous throughout
very many scientific disciplines at a level far beyond their didactic purposes. ‘Raisonner
par analogie c’est construire la pensée,’ as the French logician Maurice Dorolle wrote
more than half a century ago (1949: 178).

Analogies in archaeology
Archaeology forms no exception. Basic concepts from the disciplinary past like ‘the
ladder of inference’, ‘the archaeological record’, and ‘material culture as text’ are in fact
metaphorical constructs. To speak about the past and the study of it inevitably requires
the imaginative use of external devices. A recent book like Steven Mithen’s The Prehistory
of the Mind (1996) makes ample use of analogies, models, and metaphors. Dealing with
an abstract notion like ‘the human mind’ the author drew on several metaphors to visualize his ideas to the reader. As such, the mind was likened to a sponge, a computer, and
even a Swiss army knife (to illustrate its presumed modular build-up). Yet beyond this
tutorial value, much seems to indicate that metaphorical reasoning was instrumental in
the development of Mithen’s theory. This is especially true of his key comparison between the evolution of the human mind and the development of the gothic cathedral.
According to Mithen, the mind had originally started like a Norman church with a nave
of general intelligence. Later, multiple chapels of specialized intelligences were added,
and finally these modular intelligences were integrated and connected like the chapels
of a gothic cathedral. Much seems to indicate that this architectural history of the medieval church was more than just an illustration of the evolutionary development of human cognition. Mithen himself admitted that when he started reading on evolutionary

There is a long-standing history of visualizing the human mind, and in particular memory, by means
of metaphorical associations. See Draaisma (1995) for an excellent study.

14

from primitives to primates

psychology he was reminded of the excavations of an Italian church in which he had
participated as a student. It is therefore unlikely that his whole theory was in place before the architectural metaphor was drawn. On the contrary, the perception of the mind
as a cathedral must have helped him to develop his ideas in an otherwise fairly abstract
research domain. The architectural analogy might be unusual in archaeology, the use of
analogies as such is certainly not.
Judging from the wealth of publications, the most acknowledged form of analogical reasoning in archaeology is without doubt the use of ethnographic analogy.
The tenor of debate about it sounds much like the one described above. While
most archaeologists would rapidly agree on the historical role analogy has played
in the formative stages of the discipline, especially in the recognition of stone
tools (Orme 1981: 2-21), the opinions are much more divided when it comes to
an appreciation of today’s application of ethnographic analogies. Richard Gould’s
characterization of it as ‘an idea whose time has gone’ (Gould 1980: x, original
italics) is diametrically opposed, ostensibly on the face of it, to Ian Hodder’s assertion that ‘all archaeology is based on analogy’ (Hodder 1982a: 9). Similarly, when
Leroi-Gourhan believed that analogies might have been useful for nineteenth century scholars, he strongly urged modern archaeologists to abandon ‘ce folklore
scientifique’ (Leroi-Gourhan 1964: 151). Clearly, what is at stake here is the same
question whether analogies are provisional or permanent in science. From a historical perspective, however, there is no need to settle this tenacious dispute; but
observing the pervasiveness of analogical arguments throughout the history of
the discipline, even implicitly in the works of critics such as Leroi-Gourhan and
Gould (Wylie 1982), gives credit to the theory of a central importance of analogies. If all archaeology is somehow analogical in practice, if not in principle, this
strongly calls for a detailed historical study of the use of analogies in reconstructing the past.
The role of primate models in the construction of our image of the past has
been much less appreciated by archaeologists. This is due to a number of factors. In the first place, analogies based on primatological observations are a relatively recent phenomenon. Whereas ethnographic ‘savages’ were already since the
Renaissance interpreted as living relics representative of the European past, substantial primate models only began to be formulated after the Second World War
(see the introductions of Chapters 2 and 4). Secondly, analogies based on primatological observations have almost exclusively been applied to the specific field of
early hominid studies in Africa; a more general archaeological appreciation beyond these spatial and temporal confines was thus prevented. Compare this with
the world-wide application of ethnographic parallels for periods ranging from
the Upper Palaeolithic to postmedieval times. Thirdly, students of early hominids and their material remains have often followed a different theoretical course
related to the philosophy of the natural sciences than the more hermeneutic tack
often steered nowadays by archaeologists working on more recent periods. Based
on an erroneous equation of primatology with sociobiology, a general ‘culturalist’
reluctance to consider aspects of the biology of fully modern humans, has only increased this polarization between Palaeolithic and more recent archaeologies (Loy

analogies

15

and Peters 1991). Fourthly, the majority of these models have been constructed by
primatologists and palaeoanthropologists, not by archaeologists. In fact, the desire
to shed light on human nature and its origins was a main incentive to the rise of
primatology, and although nowadays this anthropocentric question is no longer
the only motivation, there is hardly a grant proposal or a textbook in primatology
which does not try to draw implications about humans, modern and fossil ones
alike, by comparing them with primates. And fifthly, primatologists and palaeoanthropologists talk about primate models; archaeologists about ethnographic analogies. This different terminology has also contributed to the absence of primate
models in archaeological discussions on analogy. Apart from a short article by
Foley (1992), primate models and forager analogies have thus far not been treated
in the same conceptual terms. Of course, this is not to deny the vast ontological
differences between humans and primates, but methodologically both primate
models and ethnographic parallels rely on similar arguments by analogy.
Despite this disciplinary gap between the ethnographic analogy and the primate model, both archaeologists and primatologists make claims about the past
derived from observations of currently living systems. There is no final reason for
excluding primate models from a historical study of analogy, as long as we make
clear what we understand by ‘model’ and ‘analogy’.

Models and analogies
The terminological discrepancy between primate models and ethnographic analogies is interesting and needs further clarification. Rather than trying to define the
concepts in strictly logical terms (a point which, moreover, has never been adequately settled), it is more interesting to look at what they have meant in archaeology and primatology itself. The terms should be understood by their structural
opposition in both disciplines, not by any in vitro definition of their semantic
signifieds.
In archaeology, the term analogy came in use during the 1960s, particularly with
Ascher’s landmark ‘Analogy in archaeological interpretation’ (Ascher 1961) and Binford’s
‘Smudge pits and hide smoking: the use of analogy in archaeological reasoning’ (Binford
1967). Of course, many ethnographic parallels had been drawn before, but it was only
in the vocabulary of the early processual archaeology that ‘analogy’ became the term to
indicate this practice and it has remained so ever since. The concept of ‘model’, on the
other hand, surfaced a bit later in the early 1970s with the infiltration of processual
thought and systemic geography in British archaeology. Two highly influential volumes
of the time had the word in their title, Models in Archaeology (Clarke 1972a) and The
Explanation of Culture Change: Models in Prehistory (Renfrew 1973a). From the very
beginning, model had a broader meaning than analogy. Clarke (1972b, 1) stated that
‘models are pieces of machinery that relate observations to theoretical ideas.’ When he
discussed ‘the morass of debate about the proper and improper use of historical and

British archaeologists borrowed the notion of model from the New Geography. As an inductive approach (cf. infra) it was quite different from the hypothetico-deductive and deductive-nomological
obsessions in American archaeology at the time.

16

from primitives to primates

ethnographic “parallels” in archaeological interpretation’ he called it ‘merely a particular
setting of the universal debate about the proper and improper use of models in general’
(Clarke 1972b: 40). Of course, there are very many functions and definitions of models (cf. Apostel 1961), but in archaeology the term generally designated some form of
formalized explanatory framework for a set of phenomena, which could be established
by means of an ethnographic analogy, but also through a replicative experiment, a computer simulation, a lawlike generalization, a statistical prediction or any other ‘model’
(Clarke 1972b). ‘Model’ was something that stood between a specific interpretation and
a general theory or a law; it often consisted of mathematical equations, flow charts and
feedback mechanisms. It referred both to the explanation as to the source on which this
explanation was built.
Both terms thus originated in the context of processual archaeology and since this
has been exposed to various forms of criticisms, it should be no surprise that the popularity of the terms has varied accordingly. For instance, in recent years contextual and
post-processual archaeologists dispelled the notion of ‘model’ altogether as it was felt
to be too heavily laden with connotations of formal, mechanistic, positivist, systemic
explanation—which conflicted with their view on interpretation and their definition
of humanity. The term ‘analogy’, on the other hand, was already criticized in the late
1970s by certain processual authors. Gould repeatedly urged to move ‘beyond analogy’ (1978b; 1980; Gould and Watson 1982) and Schiffer (1978: 234) wanted ‘to
dispense entirely with the word analogy’, believing that ‘model or hypothesis will
usually provide a better fit’ (original emphases). Nevertheless, these were only attempts to reject one particular form of analogy, i.e. projective analogy, in favour of
another, more sophisticated one. ‘The reaction against analogy’ (Wylie 1985) has
therefore never effaced the popularity of the term in archaeology. On the contrary,
today the very word ‘analogy’ still functions as a shorthand for ‘ethnographic analogy’,
even if very recently certain post-processualists prefer to talk about metaphorical associations than analogical links (Tilley 1999; Holtorf 2000).
In biology, the term analogy dates at least back to the nineteenth-century
comparative anatomy of Richard Owen who distinguished it from homology. The
human hand and the wings of a bat were said to be homologous because of their
similarity of structure; but the wings of the bat and the wings of a fly were called
analogous because of their similarity of function. Later, after the evolutionary turn,
homologies were translated as ‘the response of the same organ, inherited from a
common ancestor, to different selective pressures’ and analogies as ‘the response by
different organs to the same selective pressures’ (Cain 1976: 26). This vocabulary
was not restricted to anatomy only. With the rise of ethology in the 1920s, it started to be applied to animal behaviour when field biologists like Niko Tinbergen
and Konrad Lorenz began to treat fixed patterns of behaviour in the same terms
as organs (Atz 1970). According to them, behavioural patterns such as the stickleback’s courtship display could be studied like the wings of the bat and were
thus treated as either homologous or analogous. Popularizing the results of the
ethology, authors like Lorenz and Desmond Morris were eager to establish further
analogies between animal and human behaviour. Lorenz’ On Aggression (1966)
explained human violence by reference to wolf behaviour, Morris’ The Naked

analogies

17

Ape (1967a) explained human sexuality by reference to chimpanzee behaviour.
Yet their often impressionistic method became so much criticized that the very notion of analogy came to carry a very negative stigma. S.A. Barnett’s review of On
Aggression was called ‘On the hazards of analogies’ (1968). Barnett regretted that
‘so much talent should have been misapplied’ and found the analogical method
‘essentially anti-rational’: ‘This method should be repudiated by all scholars—indeed, by all responsible people’ (83). The leading primatologist Zuckerman (1981:
387-97) warned that these sorts of analogies only led to anthropomorphism and
this was probably the last thing a young discipline like primatology wanted. He
wrote: ‘I shall be surprised if analogical writing does not in the end bring discredit on the field of study now called primatology’ (Zuckerman 1981: 392). In
the early 1970s, the term ‘model’ started to be preferred to indicate the inferences
that were drawn from baboons, chimps and bonobos; while the term ‘analogy’ was
abandoned or only applied to a remote source like the gelada baboon where there
was no danger of anthropomorphism. To many primatologists, the emotive value
of ‘model’ was that of scientific, sound, reliable; that of ‘analogy’ impressionistic,
vague, and speculative.
This particular terminological history explains why primatologists prefer to
talk about ‘baboon models’ and ‘chimpanzee models’. Like in archaeology, ‘model’
indicates both the source in the present world as well as the explanation resulting
from that source.

Analogy as a process
A history of terms is not a history of concepts. The terminological discrepancy between archaeologists and primatologists can be easily overcome and reconciled. In
fact, this was already done by some of the practising scientists themselves. On one
of the rare occasions in which an archaeologist debated the use of external sources
with primatologists, Richard Potts could be heard to speak of ‘analogies, or species-specific models’ (1987: 34). According to him the structural equivalence between both was evident. Jeanne Sept, an archaeologist who studied chimpanzee
nesting, equally noted that primatologists who worked at ‘modeling’ were comparable to archaeologists who ‘have long debated the appropriate use of analogy
in prehistoric reconstruction’ (1992: 204). Indeed, both terms are closely related.
Whereas in primatology the preference for the word ‘model’ refers to the starting point (the model as source) and the end point (the model as explanation) of
the argument, the notion of analogy which prevails in archaeology relates to the
inferential process between these two extremes. ‘The relation between the model
and the observations modelled,’ David Clarke (1972b: 2) wrote, ‘may in general
be said to be one of analogy.’
In this work, I will consider analogy as the process by which the model is put to
work. In logical terms, the analogy is the ‘argument’ linking the two senses of the
word model, i.e. from ‘premises’ to ‘conclusion’. The model (as source) from the
present world—no matter whether we talk about an Aboriginal stone-knapper or a
troop of savannah baboons—can only yield statements about the past (the model as
explanation) through an argument by analogy. Analogy is the bridge between both.

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from primitives to primates

As the main question of this work concerns the inferential structure of arguments
rather than their inferential extremes, I prefer to use the term analogy.
Analogy has moreover received widespread attention from scholars in inductive
logic, philosophy of science and cognitive psychology. Aristotle already discussed
analogy as a literary trope, J.S. Mill laid the foundations of inductive logic in the
nineteenth century (after the long-standing dominance of Baconian deductive
logic), but it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that philosophers and logicians seriously addressed the issue of scientific analogy. Mary Hesse’s
Models and Analogies in Science (1966) was a landmark which influenced all other
writings on the topic. It specified the relations within the analogy and stressed the
importance of causality. Leatherdale (1974) introduced the notion of manifest
and imported analogues. The work of Salmon (1963), Copi (1972), Barry and
Soccio (1988) and Freeman (1988) detailed the criteria for appraising analogies.
Whereas all these authors treated analogy as a finished mental product, in recent
years cognitive psychologists have started to investigate the process of analogical
reasoning. By means of large-scale experiments, they study how human reasoning
actually occurs when analogies are drawn. Inspired by Schön’s (1963) stimulating
work on the displacement of concepts and Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) famous
essay on metaphor, authors like Holland, Nisbett, Gentner, Hofstadter and especially Holyoak and Thagard have greatly enhanced our understanding of analogy (Holyoak and Thagard 1995; 1997). Holyoak and Thagard’s Mental Leaps:
Analogy in Creative Thought (1995) forms the putative apex of this innovative
research field. An excursion into the disciplines of inductive logic, philosophy
of science and cognitive psychology is therefore required if we want to develop a
precise conceptual language for talking about analogies.

The structure of analogy
Analogical inferences are perhaps the most commonly used form of reasoning and
occur as much in day-to-day life as in scientific practice (Holyoak and Thagard
1995). If I go to a specific pub on Friday night because I remember that the previous times I was there the atmosphere was quite nice, the beer rather good and the
people friendly, I am basically relying on an analogical argument which is not very
different from the billiard ball model for gases. Indeed, despite their enormous
internal differences, ‘all analogical arguments have the same general structure or
pattern’ (Copi 1972: 353).
My expectation that I will have another good time in this pub is based on a
number of similarities with my former visits: it is again Friday evening, the interior is the same, the same friends are present, the landlord hasn’t changed, and
the beer is supplied by the same brewery. Under these conditions, I had a nice
evening last time; therefore, all things being equal, I might have a good time now.
The same holds true with the billiard balls. Because of the observed similarities
between gas molecules and billiard balls (spherical volumes, elasticity, motion and
impact in bounded space, etc.) and because billiard balls are known to collide

analogies

19

more frequently when space is reduced, therefore, the gas molecules will have a
higher impact rate if the reservoir is smaller.
I am aware of the fact that there is quite a distinction between pub visits and
gas molecules. In the one case, we speak about two specific instances from the
same domain; in the other about two distinct domains that are mapped onto each
other. Leatherdale (1974) has introduced the distinction between ‘manifest analogue’ and ‘imported analogue’, whereby the former relates to proximate sources
of inspiration from the same domain and the latter to remote sources of inspiration from very different domains. The distance between the analogues is much
larger in the gas case than it is in the pub case; and the regularity is lawlike for the
one and statistical for the other. However, these differences do not affect the structure of the argument (Copi 1972; Holyoak and Thagard 1995). This becomes
clear if we schematize both examples. The pub case can be translated as follows:
This time and last time I went into this pub, the landlord, the brewery and the
interior were the same;
Last time I was here I had a good time;
therefore, this time I will probably have another good time.
Similarly, the billiard ball example becomes:
Gas molecules and billiard balls have the same impact and motion;
Billiard balls collide more frequently in a reduced space;
Therefore, gas molecules will probably collide more frequently in a reduced
space.
In both examples, we predict new similarities on the basis of observed similarities.
If A and B are instances with properties x, y and z, then the above examples can be
formulated schematically (cf. W. Salmon 1963: 70; Copi 1972: 353; Kondakow
1978: 28; M. Salmon 1982: 61):
A and B have properties x and y;
B has also property z;
therefore, A has probably also property z.

Figure 1. A diagram for
visualizing the logical
structure of analogical
arguments

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from primitives to primates

This simple scheme forms the core of any form of analogical reasoning. It can also
be visualized in a diagram (figure 1). Let the right side of the figure be the more
familiar pair of the analogy and the left side the less known entity and let the
observed resemblances serve as the bottom line on which the predicted similarity
rests, then we easily recognize the logical structure of every analogy.
The most enigmatic word in the scheme above is the word ‘probably’. In a
discussion of analogy the issues of truth and certainty cannot be passed over in
silence.

Truth and validity
Whenever studying analogies, the logical distinction between truth and validity is
essential. This is a theme where logicians have been very firm: if analogies are arguments, it follows that analogies can never be true or false. Truth is an attribute of
a conclusion or a premise and refers to the material content; validity is an attribute
of an argument and refers to its formal structure. Thus, conclusion and premises
can be true or false, but arguments are said to be valid or invalid (Hodges 1977:
53-60). To say that ‘this or that analogy is true’ comes down to a logical absurdity.
The reason why I stress this is because all too often confusion has arisen by claims
that a true analogy or a best model have been found. An analogy is neither true
nor false, it is at best valid and inspiring.
The relation between truth and validity is a fairly complex one. In strict logical terms, a valid argument does not necessarily entail a true conclusion and, inversely, an invalid argument may contain true premises and conclusions (Van De
Putte 1982: 6-8). Consider the following well-known examples.
I fit into my pyjamas;
My pyjamas fit into my suitcase;
Therefore I fit into my suitcase.
Formally, this argument is valid but its conclusion is false (because the characteristic of physical volume which is essential to the pyjamas when we speak of ‘fitting
into’ is different in the first and second premise). Yet when I state that:
All humans are mortal;
Socrates is mortal;
therefore, Socrates is a human.
the premises and the conclusion are true, but the argument is invalid because
there are possible situations in which the premises are all true but not the conclusion. This would for example be the case if Socrates was the name of my dog.
(Note that although truth and validity are two distinct qualities, the validity of the
argument could only be ascertained by looking for true or false counterexamples.)
The above argument would become valid if we interchange the second premise
and the conclusion:
All humans are mortal;
Socrates is a human;
therefore, Socrates is mortal.

analogies

21

This is the classical example of a logical syllogism which respects the formal laws
of validity. The argument is valid because not one case can be imagined in which
all the premises are true and the conclusion false. Therefore, a valid argument is
like ‘a mechanism’ which transfers the truth of the premises to the conclusion
(Van De Putte 1982: 8). Neither the material truth of the premises nor the formal
validity of the argument does on its own guarantee the truth of the conclusion. If
both premises are true and the argument is valid, the conclusion will be equally
true. Both are as important.
But to return to analogies. In order to judge whether certain analogical conclusions are true, one does not only need to investigate whether the premises are true
(i.e. whether the right ethnographic case or primate species is invoked), but also
whether the argument by analogy is valid. All too often, discussions on analogical
reasoning remain confined to a discussion of the premises, without considering
the argument itself. To use an architectural metaphor, much attention has been
spent to the furniture, but far less to the construction of the building itself.
What is this validity? All the examples I have used thus far derive from deductive
logic which is the strongest branch of logic, because the truth of the premises is transferred by necessity and with absolute certainty to the conclusion. However, all logicians
agree that the argument by analogy is an inductive form of reasoning and therefore less
strong than the perfect syllogism (Dorolle 1949: 170-2; W. Salmon 1963: 70-3; Copi
1972: 351-68). After all, the truth of an analogical conclusion does not derive from a
general rule such as in deductive reasoning, but from a parallel case. Analogical arguments have rightly been called ‘ampliative’ because their conclusions tell more than the
premises, i.e. they expand rather than deduce the truth from the premises (Wylie 1985).
Analogies are generally less strong than deductive arguments, but this does not mean
that all arguments by analogy are equally acceptable. Hodges says that ‘arguments can
be good without being valid. We may call an argument rational if its premises provide
good reason for believing the conclusion, even if the reason is not absolutely decisive’
(Hodges 1977: 59, original italics).
When it comes to the truth claim of inductive conclusions, a relative probability can be assessed. The logician Copi (1972: 38) is clear about this:
Although no argument by analogy is ever valid, in the sense of having its conclusion follow from its premisses with logical necessity, some are more cogent than
others. Analogical arguments may be appraised as establishing their conclusions
as more or less probable.

An analogical conclusion may be as sound as one reached by deduction but the problem lies in the
difficulty of determining its truth.

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from primitives to primates

and Thagard, two cognitive psychologists who have published extensively on analogy, regard it as ‘a source of plausible conjectures, not guaranteed conclusions’
(Holyoak and Thagard 1995: 30).
In sum, in inductive arguments truth and validity are transformed into probability and plausibility. If we want to investigate analogies, we shall have to deal
with relative plausibility rather than absolute validity. For logicians, the lack of
optimal strength may be disappointing; for historians, however, this makes analogies all the more interesting. Indeed, such inductive challenges have provoked a
wide-ranging diversity of solutions through time (as will be clear from the following chapters). If induction is sometimes called ‘the scandal of philosophy’, historians wring their hands about such scandal.

Entities and relations
Scandals and excitement notwithstanding, we first need to elaborate a precise vocabulary for talking about analogies in the study of prehistory. My attempt to apply concepts
from logic to archaeological analogies is far from original; this received considerable
attention during the early 1980s (cf. Hodder 1982a: 16-24; M. Salmon 1982: 57-83;
Wylie 1982; 1985). Especially Alison Wylie’s 1985 paper ‘The reaction against analogy’
still remains, after nearly fifteen years, the best treatment of the problem. Yet what distinguishes my approach from previous ones, is my insistence on the distinction between
truth and validity and my reliance on insights from cognitive psychology. Unlike former
workers in this field, I also use this logical framework primarily as a tool for historical
analysis rather than as a device for methodological improvement. And my intention to
treat primate models in similar terms as ethnographic analogies sets it apart from the
hitherto exclusive attention to ethnographic parallels.
Let us start with a historical example. When early modern antiquarians invoked descriptions of the use of stone tools amongst non-European natives in order to explain the function of what had previously been considered ‘thunderbolts’,
ethnography served the same function as the billiard balls and the previous pub
experiences described above, i.e. as sources of familiar knowledge for explaining an
unfamiliar observation. Since the unknown is interpreted in terms of the known,
all analogies can be divided in two parts or analogues, with the source being the
more familiar side from which predictions are made and the target as the part of
the analogy which is under study (Holyoak and Thagard 1995: 2). These terms
are to be used in the widest sense. The source can be anything from a specific tool
type in Papua New Guinea to a cross-species correlation between body size and
range of territory in monkeys and apes; the target may range from a functional
attribution of a tool to an entire scenario of hominid evolution. Synonyms for
this twin concepts include alternatives like ‘model and referent’, ‘base and target’,
‘source and subject’, ‘vehicle and tenor’, and ‘discontinuous and continuous term’
(Hesse 1966; Leatherdale 1974; Sapir 1977; Moore 1996).

See also Ravn (1993) who applied Wylie’s logical framework to the history of analogy in Danish
prehistoric studies.

analogies

23

Another distinction should be made. The antiquarians started from an observed
similarity between the form of present and prehistoric stone tools, and formulated a
predicted similarity in terms of function. If you have only physical remains, these observed similarities always concern material aspects on the basis of which non-material
aspects are inferred (Stoczkowski 1992). The form of a stone tool is a material aspect,
its function is non-material. These concepts are related to the Binfordian terms ‘statics’
and ‘dynamics’ which are, however, too specifically archaeological to be useful for our
purpose. ‘Material’ and ‘non-material’ are to be preferred over statics and dynamics,
although often the idea of observed and predicted similarity will suffice.
The last pair of concepts is less problematic to define. Antiquarians disposed
of three categories of observation: the form of the prehistoric tool, the form of
the ethnographic tool, and the function of the ethnographic tool. What was to
be explained was the fourth category: the function of the prehistoric tool. In an
archaeological analogy an inference is always drawn from a set of observable phenomena in the present about a non-observable aspect of the past (Gifford-Gonzalez
1991). The source side of the analogy evidently belongs to the realm of contemporary observations, but it has been rightly stated that ‘all the observational statements generated by the archaeologist [are] contemporary facts’ (Binford 1981:
22). Therefore, what we will term observables does not only encompass the material and non-material entities of the source, but also the material entity of the
target, i.e. the archaeological and fossil record. In practice, however, Palaeolithic
archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists will often stress the observables of the
record, while primatologists and ethnoarchaeologists will work more confidently
on the observable source side.
The six entities of an archaeological analogy, (source and target, materials and
non-materials, observables and non-observables) can be easily summarized in a
scheme (figure 2). On their own, these entities do not constitute an analogy as
long as the relations between them remain unconsidered. Following Mary Hesse
(1966: 59), two sorts of relations can be discerned in our diagram: horizontal relations of similarity and vertical relations of causality. The former refer to the resemblances between source and target in terms of identities or differences; the latter
to the relations between the material and non-material entities. Hesse (1966: 8)
distinguishes between three forms of similarity relations: ‘positive analogy’ for the
observed similarity between source and target, ‘negative analogy’ for the observed

Since Binford (1981), we are well accustomed with the terms ‘statics’ and ‘dynamics’ whereby the
former refer to material traces and the latter to behavioural correlates, comparable to the footprint
and the bear. Despite being attractively succinct, these terms have the disadvantage of connoting
some form of causality, statics were thought to be caused by dynamics. While this is true in fields
such as zooarchaeology where observed patterns such as cut-marks need to be interpreted in terms of
inferred processes, the distinction is too specific for the rest of archaeology. In reaction to Binford’s
view of material culture as a static reflection of a dynamic living system, several authors have stressed
the active and dynamic qualities of material culture. Talking about ‘statics’ and ‘dynamics’ is also
inadequate when we want to include the field of palaeoanthropology. If we find an increase in brain
size during the early Pleistocene, the observation is surely material but not static: rather than being
unidirectionally caused by an immaterial, dynamic process, this pattern is itself causative for a
number of immaterial effects such as cognition and language. The material entity is here the causing
bear and the created footprint is archaeologically lost.

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from primitives to primates

Figure 2. The entities and relations in an archaeological analogy

dissimilarity, and ‘neutral analogy’ for properties whose similarity is unknown.
The latter category is the most interesting one, because it enables us to predict
further, unobserved similarities. Hesse’s distinction is a useful one because it reminds us that analogical reasoning always proceeds from observed similarities to
predicted similarities in the light of manifest differences. I will return to this issue
later on.
Similarities can be situated at different levels: between attributes, between
propositions, and between systems (Holyoak and Thagard 1995: 101-37).
Similarity of attributes consist of one-to-one statements of the sort ‘a is b’ or ‘a::
b’ (for instance, ‘the smooth cutting edge of a prehistoric axe is like the one found
on a Papuan axe’). Similarity of propositions detail relations between attributes.
This is the classical proportional analogy which has the form ‘a is to b, as c is to
d’ or ‘a:b::c:d’ (for instance, ‘the polish on the prehistoric tool relates to its specific function, like the polish on the Papuan tool to cutting trees’). Similarity of
systems detail relations between propositions so that one can say ‘A is to B, as C
is to D’ or ‘A:B::C:D’ (for instance, ‘the overall characteristics of the prehistoric
tool such as polish, form, weight, raw material suggests a function of an axe, just
like all characteristics of the Papuan tool were related to that of cutting trees’).
Whereas similarities between attributes are the ones that are most rapidly noted,
similarities between relations and systems are often more interesting. For example, the formal resemblance between a prehistoric and a Papua New Guinean axe
may be apparent, but the principle that an axe requires this or that specific form is
much more interesting to reason from. A good analogy specifies in the first place
resemblance of relation (between attributes, between propositions), rather than
form (of the attributes).
The second set of relations concern the causality between the material and nonmaterial entities. Observing the similarities and dissimilarities between source and
target will obviously not yield interesting predictions if the observed and predicted similarity are causally unrelated. For example, if I would infer that the atmosphere in the pub will be as convivial as it was last week because I am wearing the

analogies

25

same pair of shoes as last Friday, the argument will not be very strong as there is no
causal link between my shoes and the pub’s ambiance. Similarly, if an antiquarian
would reason that a prehistoric tool had this or that function because its colour
is the same to that of ethnographic specimens, his conclusion will be doubtful.
Hesse was the first to stress that the observed and predicted similarity need to be
causally related and this is only possible if the similarity is one of relations rather
than attributes. Causality, however, has a dubious meaning when studying prehistory as it is generally acknowledged that only some patterns of the past are causally
explicable, whereas many forms of complex human behaviour defy any such interpretation. Rather than repeating a long discussion on where to draw the extent of
causally explicable phenomena in the past, it is important to underline that Hesse
uses the term causality in its strict logical sense. How students of prehistory have
dealt with this notion of causality will be discussed in subsequent chapters.
An analogy in the study of prehistory can thus be defined as an argument whereby a
prediction is made about an unobserved, nonmaterial aspect of the target on the basis
of observed similarity (in the light of observed dissimilarity) between material aspects
of the source and target which are to some degree causally related to their nonmaterial
aspects.

An ideal case
Granted that no analogy is ever absolutely valid, under what conditions do we
reach maximum plausibility? If the empirical content of the entities is true, the
plausibility of an analogy hinges upon the quality of its vertical relation of causality. Ideally, this relation should be unambiguous in the present and uniformitarian
to expand it to the past. ‘If A then B’ should be ‘if and only if A then always B’.
In order to be unambiguous, the relation between material and non-material
entities in the present source will need to be causal not only in Hesse’s logical
sense but also in practice. This causality requires to be exclusive: ‘if and only if ’. If
we want to infer the function of a prehistoric stone tool by analogy, we will have
to be sure that the axe-like tool we observe in ethnographic contexts could not
have been anything else but an axe. Form and function need to be unambiguously
linked. If we find that some axes have entirely different forms or that some axelike tools do not serve as axes at all, our argument will be seriously flawed. This
frequent source of confusion is recognized as the problem of equifinality—the
same effect can be caused by a number of different processes—and is antithetical
to the desired unambiguity.
Related to the problem of equifinality is the fallacy of affirming the consequent. It goes like this: ‘a tool for cutting trees has the form of an axe; we found
an axe-like tool; so it was used to cut trees.’ The structure of it is ‘if A then B, we
have B, therefore A’. Why is this wrong? A straightforward example makes this
clear: all black animals are raven, I have found a black animal, therefore it is a
raven. Wrong of course, because it could be a bat, a fly or a panther. The fallacy of
affirming the consequent is a classical error against the syllogism: its premises may
be right, but since there are cases where the conclusion is wrong, the argument is

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from primitives to primates

invalid. The problem is that it bases its conclusion on the consequent (the minor
term) rather than the antecedent (the major term). In archaeology, the danger of
committing this fallacy is very real: since we have only material remains from the
past, and since these are often the static result of an unknown antecedent, we affirm the wrong entity. An axe-like form? It must be an axe, we reason, forgetting
that an axe-like form may have very different functions.
Establishing a causal, unambiguous link in the present is not enough if we
want to make reliable predictions about the past. The link will also require to be
uniformitarian, i.e. we need to know whether the processes we observe today are
similar to the ones in the past: ‘then always B’. We might find that the form of an
axe today is causally and unambiguously determined by its function, the functional interpretation of a prehistoric tool will be much stronger if this link holds across
time. Following Lyell’s original use of the term, uniformitarianism has provoked
an extensive but unresolved discussion in archaeology. Just as with the concept
of causality, uniformitarianism became another processual pet notion (Binford
1978b: 12; 1981: 27; Gould and Watson 1982) which was generally thought to be
quite reliable in mechanistic realms such as taphonomy and zooarchaeology but
much more problematic when it comes to complex forms of human behaviour.
To speak of uniformitarian assumption presupposes that one knows how causes
behave through time, and this is very often the question at stake.
If causal unambiguity and uniformitarianism can be firmly established, it is
easy to see how the analogical source and target have become two distinct expressions of an underlying lawlike regularity. This is where the predictive power of an
analogy turns into a mere illustrative function, because when all causal links in
the past and present are known, the analogy has been replaced by a theory. In this
context Mary Hesse speaks of formal or posttheoretic analogies which are ‘different interpretations of the same formal theory’ as opposed to material analogies or
‘pretheoretic analogies between observables [...] which enable predictions to be
made’ (Hesse: 1966: 68). In the ideal case, the analogy is so strong and so independent from its specific source, that we have reached an explanatory theory.
Clearly, this is only very rarely the case. Both causal and uniformitarian assumptions have only a limited field of application which is restricted to the most
mechanistic realms where inferential confidence can be high (Gifford-Gonzalez
1991). Once we move beyond these realms, however, and try to make wider, behavioural inferences, causal let alone unambiguous and uniformitarian relations
become often hard to establish. As a corollary, many, if not most, analogies are far
removed from this ideal case. Are there other criteria we can use to evaluate the
strength of these analogies? How are we to distinguish between weak and strong
analogies? If the item under study is too complex for a mechanist analogy, how
can we further improve the analogy?

Strengthening the analogy
Since the argument by analogy is a form of inductive reasoning, the validity and
truth can never be as absolutely warranted as in deduction. One of the most
commonly held opinions says that the best way to assess an analogy is by testing

analogies

27

(Holyoak and Thagard 1995: 30). Again, we need to stress that not the analogy is
being tested here, but the prediction based on that analogy. Testing is not a procedure for establishing the validity of an argument a priori but for determining
the truth of the conclusion a posteriori. As the emphasis here is on the form rather
than the content of analogies, I will only briefly glance at the problem of testing
archaeological analogies; the ways to improve the validity of the argument will be
discussed next.
No matter how shaky the foundations of an analogy are, through rigorous testing, so the popular argument goes, one can escape the confines set by the source.
Relegating the analogy to the in positivist’s eyes inferior context of discovery, testing is supposed to belong to the more secure context of justification. It is through
a posteriori testing that the speculative prediction of the analogy can be turned
into reliable knowledge (or else rejected). The problems with this hypotheticodeductive approach are manifold since testing is ‘far from being an objective confrontation of “ideas” with “facts”, it is a complex, thoroughly inductive process of
continual adjustment between the theoretical frameworks... and the facts’ (Wylie
1985: 88). With regard to analogy, some specific problems emerge. Firstly, there
is never a total independence of the context of analogy. Because ‘prior probabilities’ (M. Salmon 1982: 78) are attached to certain analogies (not every analogy is
considered), it follows that what finally goes through testing is always a selected
set of hypotheses. Secondly, only rarely do the test implications follow with logical necessity from the predictions and very often they only amount to indicating
further similarities between source and target rather than to independently testing
the prediction (Hodder 1982a: 21-2). Thirdly, even if we can formulate an independent and causal set of test implications, we will only be able to do so by means
of another analogy with the present world from where we extract another link
between an observable and non-observable entity (Stoczkowski 1992). Ironically,
then, it seems that to escape the use of analogies through testing, we ultimately
are destined to fall back on them.
The testing of analogical predictions will play a profound role in our analysis
of primate and forager models, but we first need to investigate the criteria for assessing the plausibility of analogies (figure 3). This shifts the emphasis from truth
to validity, from content to form, and from a posteriori to a priori. Here, the standard logical literature on analogy provides us with a useful conceptual apparatus
that allows us to distinguish a number of criteria (W. Salmon 1963: 70-3; Copi
1972: 358-62; M. Salmon 1984: 65-6; Barry and Soccio 1988: 188-95; Freeman
1988: 322-4). Cognitive psychology provides very useful additional information.
(1) A first yardstick concerns the number of similarities argued from. The more
resemblances between source and target, the greater the strength of the argument. If the observed similarity is weak, the predicted similarity will be weak
as well. When comparing prehistoric objects with ethnographically known stone
tools, the number of resemblances in material, form, fabrication and use-wear will
determine the plausibility of the inference. Adding similarities to the premises
certainly strengthens the argument but it would be erroneous to think that if all
aspects in an analogy are similar a ‘perfect analogy’ is found (Wylie 1982: 393;

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from primitives to primates

Fischer 1970: 247-8). Copi (1972: 358) has rightly said that ‘it should not be
thought that there is any simple numerical ratio between the number of points of
resemblance asserted in the premises and the probability of the conclusion’. For
one thing, an argument by analogy is always based on the recognition of similarities in the light of existing differences. If there were no dissimilarity, the relation
of analogy would become a relation of identity.
(2) Since all analogies contain dissimilarities, the extent of this ‘negative analogy’
should be realized. Clearly, the amount of dissimilarity will have an impact on the argument’s cogency. This principle is no more than the inverse of the first, but in order to
fully appreciate an analogy, the dissimilarities should be made explicit. Continuing the
lithic example, we may have to note that the colour, the weight, and the raw material
of our prehistoric stone tool is different from the ethnographic one. However, such differences are not by definition to be avoided. On the contrary, to have a truly interesting analogy, a certain amount of dissimilarity is needed. The billiard balls model only
works because of the distance, not despite it. Analogies re-format a less familiar domain
with the structure of a more familiar domain, so the latter should at least be somehow
different to produce new insights; if not the analogy becomes a tautology and looses all
its heuristic potential. Compare it with the use of metaphor in poetry. If the poet says
‘November is a nineteenth-century’ the similarities of melancholy, darkness, nostalgia
are immediately clear, but the evocative power of the image only works because of the
difference, because a month cannot be century. Or compare it with rhyming verses:
a melodious rhyme occurs when two verses end on similar sounds; yet if the sounds
would be exactly the same, the rhyme would be a dull repetition. A good rhyme thus
requires a good balance between similar sounds and different sounds. Of course, science
is no poetry and arguments not rhymes. Yet the lyrical examples are instructive: they
show that the more remote the source analogue is, the more innovative its contribution
to the problem can be. (Just like the realm of poetry itself, as a remote source, can be
instructive to think about science.) Cognitive psychologists found that ‘the most interesting examples of retrieved source analogs are those in which a useful source is found
in a domain that seems far removed from that of the target’ (Holland et al. 1986: 309).
Holyoak and Thagard agree:
A complete isomorphism has nothing to be filled in, leaving no possibility for creative leaps. Incompleteness may well weaken the confidence in the overall mapping,
but it also provides the opportunity for using the source to generate a plausible
(but fallible) inference about the target’ (Holyoak and Thagard 1995: 30).

Dissimilarity does not only form a problem of analogy but also a possibility.
(3) Arguing from similarities and dissimilarities between source and target will
be seriously improved when the relevance of each of these is considered. In the
aforementioned pub example, the observation that I am wearing the same shoes is
indeed a point of similarity but not a very relevant one when it comes to predicting the ambiance inside. In the case of our prehistoric stone tool, resemblances
in form, fabrication, and especially use-wear with the ethnographic example are

‘November is een negentiende eeuw’ is a line of the Dutch poet Guillaume van der Graft.

analogies

29

all extremely relevant because they are causally related to their function in the
present. On the other hand, the similarity in raw material would be less if it appeared that other types of stone like flint or serpentine could perform equally
well. When it comes to dissimilarities, here also some are relevant and others
are not—this is what the distinction between structure-preserving and structureviolating comes down to. The difference in colour is presumably not a very crucial one when it comes to functional attribution yet a considerable difference in
weight is a dissimilarity which might weaken the argument. In order to interpret
the function of the tool, then, we will need to weigh the relevance of the observed
similarities and dissimilarities.
As a consequence, enumerating similarities is no longer enough to make a
compelling analogy. ‘Le nombre des ressemblances ne suffit donc pas,’ observes
Dorolle (1949: 149), ‘On est toujours ramené au même problème: d’où vient leur signification?’ He then goes on to distinguish between ressemblances significatives and
ressemblances trompeuses (158). Along with Dorolle, nearly all other logicians have
stressed the importance of relevance. Kondakow (1978: 27) urged for ‘wesentlich
gemeinsame Merkmale’, whereas Copi (1972: 360) is very explicit about the value
of relevant similarities:
The question of relevance is all important. An argument based on a single
relevant analogy connected with a single instance will be more cogent than one
which points out a dozen irrelevant points of resemblance between its conclusion’s instance and over a score of instances enumerated in its premisses. (original
emphases)

Cognitive psychologists, too, stressed that the relevance of similarity was more important than the amount of it. Holland, Holyoak, Nisbett and Thagard wrote: ‘Even in the
ideal case not all elements of the source situation need to be mapped. The most critical
elements are those that were causally relevant to the achieved solution’ (Holland et al.
1986: 297). Considerations of relevance thus move the discussion from strictly formal
analogies towards more relational analogies (Wylie 1985). The former are based on similarity of attributes, the latter on similarity of propositions (relations between attributes)
and systems (relations between propositions). Although the distinction between both
types is a gradual one and a continuum can be outlined between their extremes, relational analogies focus more emphatically on the principles of connection between the
material and non-material entities of both source and target. Since in practice the nonmaterial entity of the target is rarely known (in fact, this is precisely what is at stake),
we try to detect principles governing the source side such as the required form of contemporary stone axes and project these principles onto the past. In a relational analogy,
the argument shifts from the horizontal relations of similarity to the vertical relations
of causality, bringing the principles of correlation close to Hesse’s logical causality. Copi
(1972: 361) expands upon this:

Formal analogy in Wylie’s sense (1985) is quite distinct from the same term with Hesse (1966). For
Wylie, formal analogies, opposed to relational analogies, are the ones that do not consider relevance
but simply enumerate similarities. Hesse distinguishes formal from material analogies; the former
are posttheoretical and only illustrative, the latter are pre-theoretical and heuristic.

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One property or circumstance is relevant to another, for purposes of analogical
argument, if the first affects the second, that is, if it has a causal or determining
effect on the other.
The factor of relevance is to be explained in terms of causality. In an argument by
analogy, the relevant analogies are those which deal with causally related properties or circumstances. (original italics)

The two following criteria immediately hinge upon the notion of relevance.
(4) The greater the number of source contexts in the premises, the stronger the
argument. If a certain pattern between material and non-material entities is observed in a great number of instances, the correlation appears to be truly genuine
instead of incidental. If not one Friday night in the pub was fine, but a dozen of
them, this gives me more confidence about the expected ambiance. Similarly, if
my correlation in the present world between form and function of a stone tool
holds not only for one group of Papua New Guinean flintknappers, but instead
for a great number of them, my argument will be improved. Expanding the source
of the analogy, therefore, raises the inferential confidence.
(5) The larger the variety of source contexts, the more cogent the analogy will be.
Here we are not only increasing the quantity of the instances but also their quality.
A Friday night is likely to be nice if also Tuesday mornings, Thursday afternoons
and Saturday evenings are known for their good ambiance. The functional interpretation of a prehistoric stone tool will be heightened if the correlation between
form and function not only occurs among Papua New Guinean tribes, but also
among Australian aboriginals, !Kung bushmen, and Efe pygmies. This variety of
source contexts suggests that the pattern is likely to be more than incidental, but
somehow general. Broadening the source to include a great variety of contexts
does improve the quality of the inference because ‘the more dissimilar the instances mentioned in its premises, the stronger is the argument’ (Copi 1972: 359).
(6) A final criterion considers the weight of the conclusion with regard to the
premises. There should be a balance between the initial premises and the eventual
conclusion. If we conclude from a handful of formal similarities between our tools
that the prehistoric object was used as an axe in a matrilineal, horticultural and totemic prehistoric society, clearly the conclusions outweigh the premises. Similarly,
if I inferred from the given circumstances that my night in the pub will consist
of six pints of beer, four good jokes and one proper conversation with a friend,
my analogical inference will be more easily rejected. Freeman (1988: 322) has
called this the ‘inverse variation principle’, which comes down to the statement
‘the stronger the conclusion, the weaker the argument’. And, Popperians would
add, the easier the falsification. According to falsificationism, one’s conclusions
should be as precise as possible so that falsification might be easier. This is not in
contradiction to the inverse variation principle since both call for accurate, precise
inferences rather than vague generalizations on the basis of constrained premises.
Attributes should be carefully transferred rather than holistically projected towards the target.

analogies

31

Figure 3. Strengthening the analogy. In the ideal case (here in italics) the causal relation is
unambiguous within the source and uniformitarian with the target. Mostly, however, improving the analogy will consist of increasing the number and variety of sources, improving the
amount of similarity, considering causal relevance and keeping the balance between the weight
of the conclusion and the premises.

These six criteria help to evaluate the relative validity of any analogy and can
also be used to improve the strength of existing analogies. In the following chapters I shall not be concerned with improving particular analogies, nor do I wish to
solve a specific empirical question. Nevertheless, the above taxonomy of strength
criteria will prove extremely helpful in dissecting the use of analogies in the past.
In sum, I have discussed two fundamentally different ways of strengthening an
analogy. Testing, though highly problematic, serves to assess the truth claim of the
analogical conclusion. Improving the internal structure of the analogy by means
of a number of appraisal criteria, enhances the relative validity of the argument.
With this, we have specified the entities, relations and strength criteria of analogy.
We now need to study the distinct stages of analogical reasoning.

The practice of analogy
Analogies have thus far been described as existing, self-contained, complete, finished arguments while neglecting that these arguments are the result of a process
of construction. If we want to study the history of analogical arguments, it is imperative to take one step backwards to see how analogies are actually assembled,
fabricated and put to work. The question shifts then from ‘how does an analogy
work?’ to ‘how is an analogy created?’ Donald Schön, who was one of the first to
study the actual manufacturing of analogies and metaphors, speaks in this context
of their ‘developmental process’ or ‘life cycle’ (Schön 1979: 260) and indeed, it is
possible to formulate an ideal-typical sequence of steps taken in the construction
of an analogical argument. This can be called the analogical algorithm.

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The analogical algorithm
If a female chimpanzee from the Taï forest in Ivory Coast wants to crack a Panda oleosa
nut, which has one of the hardest shells of all African nuts, she chooses first a robust
stone hammer and an adequate anvil. When she starts to pound the nut, the efficiency
of her tools is put to the test and she might choose to change them. The ultimate
aim, of course, is to open the nut and eat it. In this simple example, a technological sequence can be observed involving the definition of a problem (how to open the
nut), the choice of a method (selection of hammer and anvil), the implementation of
the method (pounding), the evaluation of the method (keeping or rejecting the hammer), and ultimately the desired solution (opening the nut). In fact, when archaeologists
construct an analogy, they are going through similar conceptual stages. Earlier in this
chapter, analogies have already been described as cognitive tools. It should not come as
a surprise, therefore, that the five steps in the technological algorithm are essentially the
same in an analogical algorithm: problem identification, source selection, source implementation, evaluation, and conclusion. Each of these steps entail a number of questions.
Interestingly, cognitive psychologists have suggested a very similar fivefold division; they
believe that three major constraints on analogy (similarity, structure and purpose) are
operative in each of these steps, though with differing emphases.
(1) Identification of a problem is closely related with the purpose of the analogy.10
In the first step of an analogical algorithm, the archaeological or palaeoanthropological
problem at stake is defined. This stage of the algorithm is entirely situated at the left
side (target side) of the analogy and asks what we want to know about the past on the
basis of the given evidence. Cognitive psychologists name this stage ‘encoding the target’
or ‘transforming the target problem’ (Holland et al. 1986: 307). Although not always
rendered explicit, propositions at this stage can be seen as answers to the following questions: What is the target, which spatio-temporal segment of the past do we study? What
is the observable and material part of the target, which evidence do we have? What is
the non-observable and non-material part of the target, what do we want to know? In
order to solve this identified problem, a whole arsenal of archaeological methods will be
invoked. Those who support the use of analogical arguments will have to indicate their
ethnographic or primatological sources.
(2) With the selection of a source analogue—psychologists use the same term
or speak of ‘retrieval of a source analog’ (Holland et al. 1986: 309; Holyoak and
Thagard 1995: 115)—we move to the right side of the analogy. Questions underlying this step are: What is the source of the analogy? Do we base ourselves on a
single source or on a number of source instances? How is the choice of the source
legitimized? Which arguments do we invoke to justify the choice of the source and

It came as a surprise to see that cognitive psychologists had been working with a similar analogical
algorithm as the one suggested here. Their ideas have certainly helped to refine my scheme, though
it was developed independently.
10 Cognitive psychologists disagree as to the importance of purpose. Holyoak and Thagard take a more
pragmatic perspective in that they stress the constraint of purpose, especially in problem definition,
source selection and evaluation. Others, however, most notably Gentner, think that analogy should
be understood in purely syntactic reasons. The issue is far from clear and dates back, in fact, to
Peirce’s distinction between semantics, syntax and pragmatics (see Gentner 1983; Spellman and
Holyoak 1996; Holyoak and Thagard 1997 and Gentner and Markman 1997).

analogies

33

perhaps to reject other potential source instances? This is one of the most crucial
steps in the argument and, considering our focus on primitives and primates,
much attention will be given to it.
Since psychologists are mostly concerned with how an individual reasons,
they have often stressed the role of memory in source retrieval: ‘The selection of
source analogs highlights one of the most intriguing qualities of human memory,’
Holyoak and Thagard wrote (1995: 116). ‘For an autonomous problem solver the
most difficult step in the use of analogy is likely to be the retrieval of a plausible
source’ (Holland et al. 1986: 312). Through an ingenious experiment, they have
demonstrated that the most typical criterion for source selection during the retrieval phase is surface similarity, irrespective of its structural properties (Holyoak
and Thagard 1995: 107-8). When asked for advice about American military intervention in a fictitious war situation, participants to the experiment (who were
undergraduate students in political science) let their decision-making depend on
totally irrelevant parallels to known wars (source analogues). If the situation described showed some superficial resemblances to World War II (refugees, for example, were said to have fled in boxcars of trains), respondents favoured intervention. If the identical situation showed minor likenesses to the Vietnam War
(refugees were now said to have fled in small boats, for instance), respondents
advised against intervention. Surface similarity thus constrained to a large extent
the selection of a source analogue: ‘Salient properties, even those that are functionally irrelevant to a solution to the target problem, may affect the solution plan
indirectly by influencing the selection of a source analog’ (Holland et al. 1986:
313). This entails a danger:
The danger, of course, is that superficial cues will favor the retrieval of particular
source analogs over others that would be equally useful and would suggest alternative courses of action. Analogy, like all forms of induction, cannot be divorced
from risk. (Holland et al. 1986: 314)

Now, this risky aspect will of course be minimized when we consider analogical
reasoning not just in terms of individual, autonomous thought, but of collective,
disciplinary endeavours. But even then, the attraction of surface similarity will not
always fade away.
(3) The implementation of the source comes down to the logical structure of
analogies as defined above. Cognitive psychologists speak of ‘mapping’ and ‘transfer’ (Holland et al. 1986: 307; Holyoak and Thagard 1995: 121-30). If analogical
inferences proceed from the recognition of similarity between source and target
(mapping) and attribute further properties to the target on the basis of their presence in the source (transfer), then we should be able to identify the following
three questions: What is the observed similarity between source and target? Which
additional properties are found in the source only? And what is the predicted
similarity?
Experiments have shown that in this mapping and transfer the role of surface
similarity is inferior to that of structural similarity. Once a source analogue is
known, ‘people are extremely good at finding sensible mappings even when the

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analogs are far from isomorphic’ (Holyoak and Thagard 1995: 129). However,
there are also ‘limitations on human mapping ability’ (130), especially when both
analogues have very different internal structures or when people lack expertise to
move beyond details of a specific field in order to see its deeper, more abstract
structures.
(4) The evaluation of the analogy is the place where the initial purpose come
back into the picture. Holyoak and Thagard argue, however, that this step that is
often passed in silence:
Once two situations have been mapped and the source has been used to generate
inferences about the target, one might suppose that the job is done. In fact, this is
the stage at which analogies become most dangerous. If the mapping seems coherent and the inferences are not obviously implausible, then people are likely to feel
that they truly understand the target domain. But there is an ever-present threat:
despite what the analogy suggests, the target domain simply may not behave in
a way that parallels the source domain. In other words, despite its intuitive appeal, the inferences generated by an analogy can turn out to be wrong or seriously
incomplete. (Holyoak and Thagard 1995: 131)

They suggest, therefore, to give more consideration to the issue of testing, though
they admit that this is not always easy. Indeed, it is important to consider questions like: Is the conclusion testable (verifiable)? If so, is it tested? And does the
test confirm the prediction? Is the conclusion falsifiable? If so, is it falsified? And
does the falsification refute the prediction?
However, this cannot be enough. What Holyoak and Thagard seem to miss
is that such testing only assesses the truth claim (probability) of an inference,
not its validity (plausibility). This is where inductive logic still has more to say.
The plausibility of the analogy can be appraised by means of the six strength
criteria detailed above: What is the number of similarities argued from? What
is the number of dissimilarities? What is the relevance given to each of these
(dis)similarities? What is the number of source contexts considered? What is the
variety of source contexts? And what is the weight of the conclusion relative to the
premises? Evaluating an analogy is more than testing its propositions, it consists
of checking its strengths.
(5) Conclusion. Finally, what can be said about the problem which was set in
the first step? Has the problem been solved? Has the analogy proven successful?
If no solution has been found, what are the resulting consequences for the source
and the structure of the analogy? Holyoak and Thagard list the only three possible
verdicts: ‘the source can be applied to the target, it should not be applied to the
target, or it can be applied to the target with modifications’ (1995: 133). In most
cases, the third verdict will apply. They further suggest that analogies cannot only
solve the particular target problem, but also lead to deeper and more general principles of explanation (so-called schema induction):
The message, then, is simple. Analogy is not a surefire shortcut to expertise, far less
a substitute for careful thinking and detailed study of a new domain. But when
it is used carefully—when a plausible analog is selected and mapped, when infer-

analogies

35

ences are critically evaluated and adapted as needed, and when the deep structure
of the analogy is extracted to form a schema—analogy can be a powerful mental
tool. (Holyoak and Thagard 1995: 137)

A reading grid
In the following chapters, the above algorithm will be used as a reading grid for
studying historical occurrences of analogical reasoning. However, it is important
to keep in mind that this algorithm does not necessarily provide the description
of a chronological sequence, but rather a rational reconstruction of what happens
when an analogy is made. For example, a primatologist studying chimps will most
likely start from his source (step 2) and then see whether it can shed any light on
a palaeoanthropological problem (step 1). On top of that, not all steps will be as
neatly discernible; source retrieval often coincides with mapping, evaluation and
conclusion are not always separable. Some steps are thus skipped while others
merge. Clearly, this algorithm only serves as an ideal-typical sequence. Yet despite
the discrepancy between actual chronology and logical ideal, the heuristic value of
this algorithm remains untouched as it renders explicit the practice of analogical
reasoning. The questions associated with each of these steps are the ones all historical texts will be subjected to in the following chapter. The analogical algorithm
is a question sheet to be used during the historiographical interrogation of archaeology and primatology in order to reconstruct processes of reasoning.
Three objections can be made against this algorithmic reading grid. First,
it can be questioned whether logic is a good access to understanding scientific
practice. The anarchistic philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, always wary of
methodological rigidity, formulated it as follows:
The ideas which scientists use to present the known and advance into the unknown are only rarely in agreement with the strict injunctions of logic or pure
mathematics and the attempts to make them conform would rob science of the
elasticity without which progress cannot be achieved. (Feyerabend 1975: 303)

This is a valid point: creative thought in science often goes beyond the well-trodden paths of logic. However, this critique only applies when logic is seen as normative framework, not as a descriptive device. It might not always be possible,
nor desirable to force ongoing reasoning into the straitjacket of logic; yet it is
certainly possible to use some of that logic as a flexible instrument for describing
arguments. My use of logic comes down to a heightened awareness of cognitive
processes, not as an orthodoxy to be imposed upon science. I do not want to rob
science of its elasticity but make this very elasticity visible.
A second criticism is somewhat more tenacious. How can such modern algorithm avoid the old problem of anachronism? In order to lay bare the skeleton of
analogical reasoning in archaeology and primatology, I substantially rely on ideas
and principles from inductive logic, philosophy of science and cognitive psychology. If we now want to study historical occurrences of analogy from the first half
of the nineteenth century onwards, how can we confidently use an analytical

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framework which was only formulated during the last fifty years without forcing
our historical texts in a contemporary straitjacket? The ambition to use modern
logic for studying old texts looks suspiciously like the historian’s worst anathema—that of anachronism, whereby past events are studied and perhaps even
judged in terms of later insights. There are a number of rebuttals to this objection. Firstly, although the logical literature I have been drawing upon is relatively
recent, the standard classical treatment of analogy goes as far back as Aristotle
(Lloyd 1966) and the general principles of inductive logic were laid down by J.S.
Mill, a contemporary of the Victorian social evolutionists (Jevons 1870). So, in
strict chronological terms, the historical manifestations of archaeological analogy do not precede the logical inspiration of our treatment. Secondly and more
importantly, the allegation of anachronism would be justified if the present aim
was to write a traditional history of science which places scientific ideas in their
historical ‘contexts’. Relying on recent logic would in this view seriously distort a
genuine understanding of the past. Yet, as said in the introductory chapter, rather
than aiming at a contextual historiography, my approach is in first instance a conceptual one which tries to disentangle some of our inferential structures. This is
certainly less ambitious than the contextual, historicist programme because the
underlying question is not ‘why did some ideas appear in this or that context?’
but simply ‘what were those ideas precisely like?’. A thorough understanding of
ideas seems in any case crucial for any further interpretation. Rather than blurring the historical uniqueness of past arguments, an analysis from inductive logic
renders it more visible. Thirdly, the use of logic would be unduly presentist if the
main aim was to criticize certain forms of analogy. Although criticism will not be
entirely absent from this work, it first of all attempts to elucidate historical manifestations of archaeological analogy. Just as an Egyptologist will need to translate
his hieroglyphs into a more familiar language, the historian of analogy must make
a translation of past arguments into a comprehensive idiom. Inductive logic, then,
serves as an interpretative grid for understanding such analogies.
A third objection could be: since analogy has been largely discussed in ethnoarchaeology, my treatment of Victorian anthropology or postwar primatology
will inevitably show an ethnoarchaeological bias. There is a certain degree of plausibility in that remark. My interest in the logic of analogy was indeed sparked by
my readings in ethnoarchaeology, especially by what Alison Wylie had written,
and at the outset I was more familiar with the analogy debate in archaeology than
elsewhere—one cannot deny one’s own displinary roots. However, other, more
neutral strands of thought have equally coloured my vision. My inspiration in
cognitive psychology, for instance, was unrelated to any of the disciplines I wanted
to study. Ethnoarchaeologists have drawn upon the logic of analogy—so have I,
but with different purposes. It is not because one discipline has taken the effort
to delve into the analogy debate in philosophy, that it should be forbidden to do
so for a historian of science. Even if ethnoarchaeology had not made this logical
excursion, I would have been referring to it. So if my attitude towards analogy
sounds somewhat ethnoarchaeological, it is because of this shared reliance on inductive logic, less because of my disciplinary bias.

analogies

37

These potential objections warn against the danger of forcing texts into a straitjacket, no matter whether it is logical, anachronistic or disciplinary. The analogical algorithm, I believe, overcomes these criticisms. If used cautiously and flexibly,
it allows to study a great variety of texts without doing injustice to their individual
complexity and historical identity. Indeed, the question sheet I devised only tries
to articulate historical arguments. In this sense, my reliance on inductive logic,
philosophy of science and cognitive psychology is closer to hermeneutics than to a
narrow logical positivism. Gadamer, whose hermeneutic philosophy did not provide a shortcut to better understanding but simply a clarification of the process of
understanding, said: ‘Every statement has to be seen as a response to a question
and [...] the only way to understand a statement is to get hold of the question
to which the statement is an answer’ (Gadamer 1991: 332). Or briefly, ‘all statements are answers’ (333).
Since most applications of logic in archaeology emerged during the strongest positivist moments of processual thought (e.g. Watson, LeBlanc and Redman
1971), it may come as a surprise to find logic here described as a hermeneutic
instrument. Yet logic has many faces. Whereas processual interests zoomed in on
deductive logic, my conceptual historiography relies on inductive logic so that
from a way to reach absolute truth, the present use of logic is restricted to that of
a historical device. In a hermeneutic way, inductive logic helps to understand historical texts, that is, it helps to find the questions to which every statement is an
answer. Hermeneutic philosophers have stressed that these questions don’t need
to be the original ones the historical authors had in mind, but simply the ones the
interpreter formulates in order to make a text understandable and comparable.
The questions defined in the analogical algorithm above serve that purpose.
Inductive logic has a further hermeneutic quality. Just as hermeneutics comes
down to the reflexive, theoretically-heightened awareness of what spontaneously
happens when we interpret, inductive logic makes explicit what occurs tacitly in
day-to-day reasoning. Our lives are filled with all sorts of inductive arguments and
analogy might be the most common one. An analysis from inductive logic, such
as in the rather gratuitous examples I have used in this chapter, always articulates
an intuitive knowledge. The main value of inductive logic resides in its capacity
to lay bare the underlying but pervasive reasonings such as they occur in historical
texts. Yet which are these texts?

A corpus of texts
For the analysis of analogies in the history of prehistory, I have selected more or less
elaborate arguments from the Anglo-American world which consciously use contemporary source contexts to make constructive inferences about prehistoric behaviour. This
has to be further specified. With more or less elaborate I suggest that the argument
should be more than a passing reference to ethnography or primatology but a substantial text, consisting of at least a paragraph, but preferably an article, a chapter or a book. However, these publications are not evenly spread. My treatment
of nineteenth-century analogies will be heavily dominated by books, the one of
twentieth-century analogies by articles and chapters. Besides the easier availability

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of nineteenth-century books than articles, this imbalance is also due to a more
substantial factor: the perceived nature of scientific knowledge and the appropriate publication for scholarly discussion. It would lead us too far to discuss this in
any depth, but it seems as if nineteenth-century science, despite its acrimonious
debates, was more given to an objectivist notion of truth whereby knowledge was
stable and progressed by accumulation. Monographs, often multi-volume tomes,
were the building bricks of the scientific edifice. The genre of the scientific article became more important in the first half of the twentieth century (although it
found its origins in the earlier proceedings of learned societies), and knowledge
was increasingly being experienced as unstable, negotiated, and open to revision.
Fixity thus became fluidity. If I discuss more books for the nineteenth century, it
is because they were proportionally more numerous and more important in their
time, and more easily accessed in mine.
With Anglo-American, I restrict myself to analogical arguments which have been
formulated in Britain and North-America, or which at least have been influential
there. Debates from other national traditions will only be treated to the extent
that they had a demonstrable impact on the Anglo-American world. For instance,
it is impossible to speak about early nineteenth-century archaeology in Scotland
without mentioning the role of Scandinavian scholars like Thomsen and Worsaae;
or to deal with late nineteenth-century Palaeolithic archaeology in Britain without
considering the chronological framework set out by the Frenchman De Mortillet.
I realize that this decision misses out a number of potentially very interesting
research traditions, but feel confident in doing so given the relative autonomy,
now and then, of the debates discussed (Van Reybrouck 1994a; 1994b). Victorian
sociocultural evolutionism was, with the exception of Morgan, really very British,
and even London-based, closely aligned to the Ethnological Society and the notorious X Club. In Berlin and Paris, anthropology’s two other capitals at the time,
the tenor of debate was very different, although the life-histories of individuals like Westermarck and Boas linked it with the English-speaking world. The
same holds true for ethnoarchaeology which was for nearly fifteen years strictly
American; only in the early 1980s did it arouse a certain but very different interest in Britain, and later also in countries like France, Germany, Belgium, and the
Netherlands. Primate modelling, too, was largely a North-American endeavour;
other ethological traditions like the British and the Dutch attitudes were generally more sceptical. Granted this relative isolation of each debate as national traditions, my restriction to the Anglo-American world, therefore, was more than an
arbitrary decision.
The criterion for conscious use of source contexts demands that the argument explicitly refers to observations from the present world in order to draw inferences
about the past, implying a considerable empirical content. Whether the argument
is called ‘model’, ‘analogy’ or whatever else has no importance. Strictly theoretical studies of analogy will only be treated secondary. Texts have also to meet the
following criterions to be qualified. Their use should be constructive, i.e. analogies
are believed to contribute positively to our understanding of the past, in contrast
with more restrictive uses of analogy as cautionary tales (although such criticism

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39

can be indirectly constructive). The argument should say something about behaviour, in the widest sense of the word: social, technical, ecological, cultural, ideological. This implies that analogies which are only invoked to explain aspects of
anatomy, such as commonly done in comparative zoology, will not be considered.
(The distinction will sometimes appear artificial; studies of early hominid locomotion, for example, verge both on behavioural and anatomical aspects; studies
of primate dentition implied a behavioural component.) Clearly, an emphasis on
behaviour goes to the heart of the inductive challenge because, unlike the gratuitous example of the polished flint axe, here the notions of uniformitarianism and
unambiguity are much more problematic as they relate to human uniqueness versus the possibility to extrapolate across cultures or even species. It is one thing to
compare tools, but quite another thing to compare societies.
Finally, the argument makes a statement about behaviour in prehistory. I use
the term prehistory to indicate both the field of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic archaeology where hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeology has played an important role,
as well as the palaeoanthropology of the Plio-Pleistocene where primate modelling
made its largest contribution. The emphasis is thus on the oldest periods of human prehistory; where necessary, however, my discussion will also include more
recent periods. It is, for instance, hard to talk about the role of analogy in functionalist archaeology of the 1940 and 50s without talking about Mesolithic and
Neolithic studies, just as one cannot turn a blind eye to the role of ethnoarchaeology in contextual archaeology because it focused on more recent prehistory. My
loose definition of prehistory is thus dictated by the choice of studying a method
rather than a period.
On the basis of these criteria, a corpus of texts was assembled that relates to
the three large debates of analogy use in the study of prehistory: postwar primate
modelling, the Victorian comparative method and ethnoarchaeology. The importance of the second half of the nineteenth century cannot be easily dismissed, not
simply because it marked the birth date of both cultural anthropology and prehistoric archaeology, but also because that birth was one of Siamese twins: both
disciplines constituted each other and the comparative method was the backbone
they shared. Though sociocultural evolutionism is generally delineated between
the establishment of human antiquity around 1860 to Sollas’ synthesis of 1911,
I decided to take one step back to study the impact of the three-age system in
the second quarter of the nineteenth century. After a period of relative silence
between 1910 and 1960, ethnoarchaeology meant an enthusiastic return to analogical reasoning in archaeology, even if it was already initiated before the New
Archaeology and has fallen from grace since. Simultaneously, the discussion on
primate models emerged from an implicit palaeoanthropological agenda in the
mid-1950s, over a long period of referential modelling, to a range of alternative
approaches presented nowadays. Each of these debates will receive separate treatment in the subsequent chapters. Though they all knew their heyday and classical
formulations, their less glorious moments of growth, doubt and criticism will be
studied with equal attention, if only to avoid the danger of typifying a period by
its most extreme episodes and canonical formulations.

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from primitives to primates

The quality of the corpus of texts I decided to work with depended for a good
deal on its size. In each of the cases, an attempt was made to study as much material as was practically possible. The debate on postwar primate models covers
most of the relevant publications; the comparative method is represented by what
were, and still are, all the classical texts; the discussion on analogy in the twentieth century and in particular ethnoarchaeology makes use of a large sample of the
vast literature. When not all texts could be considered, care was taken to study the
most relevant and influential ones. For instance, the 1980s saw the publication
of hundreds of taphonomic and ethnoarchaeological studies in archaeology. But
since most of them worked within the same logic set forward by Binford, the latter’s work and an adequate sample sufficed. If the representation of each debate is
thus somewhat skewed, it is also because the debates themselves are skewed: there
are simply much more articles on ethnoarchaeology than on primate modelling.
An even representation would have been required if I were to perform statistical
analyses, but this was not the case. The interest was in arguments, not in their
relative degrees of abundance.

A choice of focus
In practice I used the reading grid defined above as my guide through the corpus
of texts. The questions associated with each step of the analogical algorithm were
put on a fill-in sheet and for each publication this questionnaire was filled in
with appropriate passages and quotes from the text, alongside my own personal
remarks and cross-references. The visual diagram (figure 2 and 3) was often helpful when harder nuts needed to be cracked. When reasoning was complex, badly
phrased or simply poor, this diagram was very useful to clarify the arguments.
Eventually, this reading grid stimulated nothing else but classical ‘close reading’ of a corpus of texts, albeit in a somehow more systematic way. Were it not so
vague, close reading might be the appropriate name of what I did. Going through
a text, catching its structure, asking questions of it, filling in the query list, dissecting its arguments, going again through it, drawing a logical diagram, checking its
sources, comparing it with contemporary texts, comparing it with texts that preceded and followed it, leaving it for a while, going back to it several months later,
reading it again, wondering whether I had been right, revising my opinion—this
is what I understand by close reading, trying to get at what the author intended to
say. If this sounds like a minimal definition of reading, one is surprised to see how
often such minimum is easily bypassed. Reading a text is certainly, as hermeneutic
thinkers say, the act of acquiring an understanding par excellence.
In my own writing about each of these periods, I have remained fairly close
to the original texts. The pendant of close reading is heavily quoting. It is very
easy to reduce entire debates to a single caricature (and this has often been done,
especially in the case of the comparative method) based on a couple of extreme
utterances. However, close reading through a debate’s constituent texts invariably
teaches that there is much more complexity, diversity, and finesse than originally
assumed. Apart from the occasional despondency, the awareness of this richness
generally leads to nuance. This can also bring a new danger with it, i.e. that one

analogies

41

starts to loose oneself in the minutiae of a text. Once you are familiar with a debate and go through a publication for the third or fourth time, it becomes possible
to comment on every passage, sentence or even word in it. The author’s sources
of inspiration, the format of argumentation, the particular vocabulary start to
become so well known that one could write footnotes to every line. Whereas this
might be gratifying, it also risks that historical discussion of a publication simply
turns into an annotated text edition.
In general, then, I have tried to find a balance between microscopic scrutiny
and sweeping generalization. Whereas the individual sections often go into considerable detail, the conclusions to each of them and to the chapters in general
tend to take a wider perspective. To use a photographic metaphor: I have mainly
used the telephoto lens, while often changing to the wide-angle when appropriate. I hope that my focus was sufficiently variable according to the circumstances,
that it was, so to speak, a powerful zoom lens rather than a set of static lenses.
Eventually, however, the prior knowledge of the reader decides whether anything
is treated with too much detail or too much dashing. A primatologist might wonder about the purpose of dissecting Tylor’s last articles, an archaeologist might enjoy this discussion, whereas a historian of anthropology would perhaps like to see
more circumstantial evidence. My treatment of texts avoids becoming unnecessarily technical or unceremoniously superficial, fully realizing, however, that writing
about several disciplines and the way they developed over two centuries inevitably
entails abstraction. What may have been lost in depth is hopefully regained in
width. The panorama is vast, but close-ups are required to appreciate it.

Conclusion
Analogical arguments permeate all historical sciences including palaeontology
and geology. When it comes to the reconstruction of early hominid behaviour,
Palaeolithic archaeologists, ethnoarchaeologists, palaeoanthropologists and primatologists have developed analogies on the basis of the available ethnographic
and primatological evidence. This chapter has first of all attempted to provide
an idiom to talk about analogies. Analogies have been defined as inductive arguments which on the basis of given similarities between two entities predict further
similarity between these entities. Being inductive, analogies are to be seen as more
or less plausible instead of valid or false and analogical conclusions as probabilistic instead of true. Still, there are a number of criteria which help assert the
strength of an analogy, especially when issues of relevance are considered. Relying
on this logical discussion, an analogical algorithm consisting of five distinct inferential steps serves as an important heuristic and hermeneutic device in the analysis of analogies from three different time-slices in the history of archaeology: the
Victorian comparative method, modern ethnoarchaeology and post-war primate
modelling. It is to these that we now must turn.

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Chapter 2

The comparative method

The comparative method of the nineteenth-century evolutionists is without
doubt the best known and best studied example of a debate on ethnographic analogy (Burrow 1966; Stocking 1987; Trigger 1989; 1998). During the past forty
years the historiographical interest for it was diverse and intense. As part of the
evolutionist renaissance in anthropology, the 1960s witnessed numerous re-editions of classical nineteenth-century texts and an avidity to study those who were
revered as the founding fathers of modern anthropology (Carneiro 1967; Harris
1968; Andreski 1969; Nisbet 1969). When the grand narrative of evolutionism
was subjected to a more distanced approach in the late 1980s, re-appraisal made
place for critical historiography and even deconstruction which turned the founding fathers into a fascinating but ambivalent legacy (Ingold 1986; Stocking 1987;
Trautmann 1987; Kuper 1988; Bowler 1989; McGrane 1989).
Why then write another study of the comparative method if authors like
Burrow (1966) and especially Stocking (1987) have done this so eloquently? The
reason is that my focus is different. Whereas the aforementioned authors remain
on the polemical context of the debate, my approach also wants to detail the
logical structure of the arguments and the debates. There has, of course, been an
interest in the logic of the comparative method (particularly Nisbet 1969), but
this tends to treat all variety together under the same, unified banner of ‘The
Comparative Method’. The approach followed here navigates between a strictly
historical and a strictly logical treatment. Building on previous scholarship, it pays
a lot of attention to the varying polemical contexts, but it also tries to treat the
various forms of reasoning as analogical algorithms.
Understanding the varying polemical contexts is important since all too often
the comparative method is treated as a package which arrived somewhere in the
early 1860s and did not change until the demise of evolutionism at the turn of
the century. The comparative method, however, had a history of its own—both
before and after 1860. It emerged from an Enlightenment legacy and further
developed during the evolutionist decades of the second half of the nineteenth
century. Stocking, for instance, has drawn attention to the link with mid-century Prichardian ethnology. Another intellectual tradition which influenced the
sociocultural evolutionists and which I would like to stress is the Scandinavian
preoccupation with the chronology of artefact assemblages which resulted in the
famous three-age system. It was because the first of the three ages, the Stone
Age, was believed to be a universal phenomenon that ethnographic parallels
with contemporary Stone Age societies could be drawn—an idea put in practice by authors like Nilsson and Wilson and which influenced later evolutionists.

the comparative method

43

For the period after 1860, the role of the degenerationist critique has been seriously underestimated in the history of the comparative method. A study of evolutionism therefore also requires a more balanced appraisal of its competing tradition, i.e. degenerationism.
The next step consists of moving from a contextual to a conceptual analysis. In
particular, I want to show how the criterion of similarity was highly valued, and
how it even turned into the single-most important yardstick for appraising analogies as the century moved on. The various debates on the three-age system, the
antiquity of man, and the degenerationist critique contributed to the widespread
belief among evolutionists that resemblances between prehistoric and exotic savages were taken-for-granted. Parallel to that development, the inferences drawn
evolved from piecemeal to wholesale. For Thomsen and Nilsson, ethnographic
analogy first served to explain strange-looking tools; for Morgan and Sollas, it
served to explain entire stages of human civilization. Nineteenth-century anthropology thus shows how the increased conviction of resemblance resulted in ever
more daring projections. This logico-historical development, I believe, has been
hitherto understudied in the scholarship on sociocultural evolutionism.
A final reason for this chapter is that it provides the necessary background to
speak about the use of analogy in the twentieth century. Primate modelling and
certainly ethnoarchaeology cannot be properly understood without prior knowledge about the Victorian debate. Ethnoarchaeology developed explicitly in reaction to the comparative method, primate modelling was implicitly indebted to
it. A re-analysis of this nineteenth-century debate is therefore needed. And to do
so requires a brief look at the pre-nineteenth century interest in non-European
primitives.

Early ethnographic parallels
A faint awareness of resemblances between the present-day manners of neighbouring
societies and the assumed history of one’s own society has been an integral part of
Western thought since Antiquity (Burrow 1966: 11; Nisbet 1969: 192-4). Aristotle
and Thucydides found in contemporary barbaric peoples remnants of what the Greeks
once had been, and Tacitus thought the Germans represented the Romans of long ago.
Yet such reasoning received some crucial impulses during the second half of the fifteenth
century. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the discovery of the New World in 1492
provided Western Europe with two critical resources to speculate about human ancestry: Byzantine scholars fled to the West and imported a great number of classical texts,
thus contributing to the Renaissance interest in Antiquity; explorers shipped at least a

For this section I have particularly relied upon Piggott’s work on the antiquarian tradition (1956;
1976; and especially 1989), Daniel (1967) and Lynch and Lynch (1968). Orme (1973; 1981),
Klindt-Jensen (1981), and Hodder (1982a) provide some additional information on the history of
ethnographic analogy, whereas Grayson’s (1983) treatment of the older phases of the establishment
of human antiquity is still unsurpassed by more recent scholarship (like Van Riper 1993). Burrow
(1966), Lemaire (1986) and Stocking (1987) give succinct but useful background on the Scottish
Enlightenment, Laming-Emperaire (1964) still stands out as a classic study on the origins of prehistoric archaeology in France, only to be recently sided by Schnapp’s impressive monograph (1993).

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thousand Indians to Europe in the decades after Columbus (Piggott 1989: 73). In a
sense, from the East came books and from the West savages—both proved to be the key
components out of which antiquarian speculation on the origin of human nature were
crafted (Lemaire 1986: 20-2).
Sixteenth-century artists were among the first to draw implications out of this
new context. Ancient Britons and American ‘savages’ were kindred iconographic themes
and the depiction of Britain’s ancestors as primitive natives was a favourite theme in the
last quarter of the sixteenth century. In 1575, the Flemish artist Lucas de Heere, temporarily resident in London, produced a fine watercolour depicting two ancient
Britons. Partly inspired by classical texts, the painter had also shown a keen interest
in overseas natives such as Eskimos (Piggott 1989: 75, plate 16; Schnapp 1993: 150).
In 1586, the painter John White took part in the Virginian expedition where he made
accurate watercolours of the aboriginal inhabitants. White eventually became Governor
of Virginia and in 1590 his illustrations were engraved by the printer Johan-Theodoro de
Bry, a native of Liège living in Frankfurt-am-Main, who published them together with
Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia as the first part of
his America (which also incorporated engravings based on Jacques le Moyne’s drawings of
Florida natives). The encounter between Englishmen and Indians in Virginia redefined
the notions of savageness and civility (Sheehan 1980); ethnographic sketchbooks became
as important as classical texts to depict the ancient Briton.
The impact of these illustrations was considerable (Piggott 1989: 85-6; Moser
1998). In the seventeenth century De Bry’s engravings were widely reproduced and
distinguished intellectuals drew upon the parallel between primitive and primeval
life. Robert Burton, the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy from 1621, recommended the lecture of reports on American natives as a cure against gloominess.
He held that the Germans described by Caesar and Tacitus were as uncivilized as
the natives of Virginia. Thomas Hobbes contended in 1651 that the brutish life
of primitive man could still be seen at work at the other side of the Atlantic. And
from Locke came in 1690 the famous dictum: ‘In the beginning all the world was
America.’ Images of North-American, especially Virginian, savageness were thus
incorporated in philosophical discourses on man’s primeval condition throughout
the seventeenth century.
Classical authors remained important and provided the most immediate resource for reconstructing the time period prior to the Roman Conquest. For instance, the popular idea that the ancient Britons painted their bodies was one
of those textual inferences. Yet reliance on the written word did not preclude an
interest in the ethnographic present. Antiquaries were at pains to prove that the
skin-covered boats mentioned by Caesar and Pliny were essentially the same as
the curraghs still seen in Ireland (Piggott 1989: 63-4). At the time, ‘Ireland and
America involved, for the English, similar experiences’ of technological and cultural inferiority (Sheehan 1980: 55). The antiquarian reconstruction of the ancient Briton was a composite picture drawing upon ethnographical images from

Perhaps this aphorism meets more the Platonic virtue of beauty than truth: books from Antiquity were
also handed down by Moorish scholarship, by medieval libraries, etcetera. The fall of Constantinople
was but one of the impulses for the Renaissance, though an important one at that.

the comparative method

45

the Americas, detailed descriptions of material culture given by classical writers,
and corroboration of these by survivals within the British Isles.
By the end of the seventeenth century, knowledge on contemporary primitive
life became influential in the solution of a long-standing problem: the recognition of thunderbolts as stone tools. In 1656 Sir William Dugdale interpreted
the so-called ceraunia found in Warwickshire as weapons used by the ancient
Britons before they had metallurgical knowledge. In 1686 his son-in-law Dr Plot
suggested that prehistoric stone tools were hafted like the Indian examples. As
the first Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Plot had ready access to
prehistoric and exotic examples of lithic implements. In a letter from 1699 (published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of 1713; cf. Daniel 1967:
39), the Welsh antiquary Edward Lhwyd who was Plot’s assistant and successor at
the Ashmolean, confidently juxtaposed British and recent North-American stone
tools to show they had been used as arrowheads.
This antiquarian scholarship in Britain fell soon into oblivion. Piggott (1989:
31-2) has persuasively argued how after the publication of Newton’s Principia
Mathematica in 1687, the non-mathematical disciplines lost social prestige and
scientific credibility while more attention was given to abstract generalizations (cf.
Piggott 1956; 1976; Lynch and Lynch 1968). Plot had once been the secretary of
the Royal Society (in 1682), but after Newton was elected president in 1703, the
antiquarian interests were paled. At the same time in Paris the Académie royale des
Sciences drew more attention to the matter. The appearance of Michel Mercati’s
Metallotheca Vaticana in 1717, a work already written in the late sixteenth century
which indicated thunderbolts as primitive implements, proved influential. Few
years later, in 1723, Antoine de Jussieu presented a paper to the Académie in which
he compared prehistoric stone tools with some recent examples from America and
Canada to infer that ‘les pierres de foudre’ had been man-made instruments.
Yet ethnography could do more than clarify stone tools. In the first half of the
eighteenth century it became clear that it held broader relevance. Joseph-François
Lafitau, a French Jesuit who had spent five years with the Indians in Canada, published in 1724 Mœurs des sauvages américains: comparées aux mœurs des premiers
temps, a telling title. Ethnographic evidence was according to Lafitau a means to
find the primitive traits of humanity, particularly in relation to religion. The epitome of Jesuit scholarship, he constantly moved between his knowledge of classical
literature and his own ethnographic observations. On most occasions the Ancients
elucidated the savages, sometimes the savages elucidated the Ancients, but the aim
was to find the characteristics of primitive religion. Lafitau’s work is interesting as
it marked a new tendency to incorporate information on savagery in theologicophilosophical speculation on human development.
Lafitau was not alone. Montesquieu wrote De l’esprit des lois in 1748. Goguet published his often reprinted De l’origine des lois, des arts et des sciences, et de leurs progrès
chez les anciens peuples in 1758. The Danish scholar Jens Kraft wrote a work in 1760

An English translation appeared three years later: The origin of laws, arts, and sciences, and their
progress among the most ancient nations (1761).

Biblical notions like the Flood, the confusion of tongues and the dispersion of
families were still authoritative, but the confrontation with ethnographic evidence
eroded the Scripture’s monopoly (Lemaire 1986: 191-5; McGrane 1989: 61-4).
Goguet’s use of the comparative method was part of a much broader history of
civilization largely built on biblical evidence. Like Lafitau, he sought to reconcile
‘les Relations des Voyageurs modernes’ with the ‘Ecrivains de l’antiquité’ (xxxiv).
The tradition of composing universal histories of mankind with overseas evidence
reached a tentative apex in the French and Scottish Enlightenment of the second half
of the eighteenth century (Bryson 1945; Meek 1976; Lemaire 1986: 198-206; Stocking
1987: 10-9). Edinburgh-based thinkers like Robertson, Ferguson, Kames, Smith and
Millar shared a great deal of their basic assumptions and ambitions with the Parisian
Lumières like Turgot, Rousseau, Condorcet and Helvétius: an interest in the history of
civilization; the conviction that this history was by and large progressive; the belief, biblical in origin, in the psychic unity of mankind; the observation of differential progress
among the nations of the earth; and the resultant principle that what was seen in presentday primitive races was essentially similar to what had characterized the prehistoric races
in Europe. Despite obvious physical differences, humans were believed to belong
to a unique species endowed with mental faculties, which were, however, not everywhere actualized to the same degree (Stocking 1987: 19, 51). Turgot and Smith
independently came up with a ‘four stages theory’ (Meek 1976) which dissected the history of civilization into four consecutive stages of socio-economic growth: hunting, pasturage, agriculture and commerce. The model proved influential throughout the second
half of the eighteenth century, particularly in Scotland (Lemaire 1986: 198; Stocking
1987: 16). Though the interest was more in ‘the progress of civilization in Europe’ than
in ‘the origin of civilization in savagery’ (Stocking 1987: 19), ethnographic comparison
was one of the pillars on which the edifice of the philosophes rested.
In sum, the idea of a comparative method emerged in several distinct contexts
with quite distinct purposes; it entailed the image of ancient Britons by late-sixteenth century, mostly London-based artists; the identification of flint artefacts

These histories are often referred to as ‘conjectural’, which is a rather unfortunate term considering the empirical, factual programme at stake (Bryson 1945: 52; Meek 1976: 239). Goguet, for
instance, stated: ‘On a trop donné à la conjecture’ (1758: v-vi).

the comparative method

47

as prehistoric tools by curators of the Ashmolean museum and by French
académiciens around 1700; and the reconstruction of une histoire raisonnée de
l’homme by French and Scottish Enlightenment philosophers. In essence, the image of primitive and primeval savageness was based on the American Indian, but
during the eighteenth century the exploration of the South Seas by Cook and the
slow penetration of Africa provided new reports on non-western others (George
1958).
The use of ethnographic analogy continuously oscillated between two extremes: either a global image or a local inference. Artists like De Heere, White,
and De Bry wanted to portray a broad visualization of the ancient Briton; antiquarians like Plot, Lhwyd and Jussieu worked on the much more circumscribed
thunderbolt-problem; the philosophes were interested in the more general stage
which a savage society embodied. From Renaissance to Enlightenment, analogies
stood between illustration and interpretation, between projection and problemsolving, between image and argument—a tension which had important repercussions in the centuries to come.
How this heterogeneous tradition of ethnographic parallels in artistic, antiquarian, theological and philosophical contexts, with its amalgam of ideas on
progress, psychic unity and comparison, its scriptural and classical underpinnings
and its illustrative, interpretative and reconstructive motivations was translated
into a consistent research programme at the birth of archaeology in the early nineteenth-century shall now be investigated.

The impact of the three-age system
The birth of scientific archaeology, traditionally associated with the Danish threeage system, is seen as a great leap forward compared to the conjectural schemes
of the eighteenth century. This section aims to stress the basic continuity between Enlightenment philosophy and Scandinavian typochronology. It acknowledges fundamental innovations in the explanation of the Bronze and Iron Age, but
shows how this has resulted in a dualist vision of prehistory. The three-age system
resulted in a two-stage account of human civilization where a natural, universal,
global Stone Age was in certain places ended by a series of local migrations during
the metal ages. The impact of this dualism on the use of ethnographic analogy was
profound, as the work of Sven Nilsson and Daniel Wilson shows. It was limited to
the Stone Age and limited to technological comparison.

A revolution in antiquarian thought?
Despite the French and Scottish schemes, it was in Scandinavia that such sequential thinking was first applied to an elaborate archaeological data set. The story has
often been told of how in 1816 C.J. Thomsen rearranged the rich materials of the
National Museum of Danish Antiquities in Copenhagen by dividing them into a
Stone, Bronze and Iron Age, a method explained by him in the famous Ledetraad

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(1836) and corroborated by the stratigraphic excavations in Danish peat bogs
undertaken by his successor J.A.A. Worsaae (Daniel 1943; 1967: 90-109; 1975:
38-55; Trigger 1989: 73-9).
The pioneering role historians of archaeology generally attribute to Thomsen has tended to obscure the long-standing tradition on which he himself built. Italian Renaissance
scholars like Agricola, Aldrovandi and Mercati had already on the basis of their readings
in Homer, Hesiod and especially Lucretius come up with the idea that there had been a
time in human history where stone was used before metal—an idea they applied to the
thunderbolts. Mercati even went so far as to suggest the existence of successive eras of
stone, bronze and iron tools.
The Italic atmosphere which pervaded seventeenth-century France and the
edition of Mercati’s work in the early eighteenth century ensured a continuity
between Renaissance scholarship and French Jesuit and Enlightenment science.
Next to Jussieu’s recognition of stone tools, Mahudel read a paper to the Académie
des Inscriptions in 1730 where he accepted Mercati’s three successive periods. In
another paper read to that academy in 1734 the Jesuit Montfaucon, whose excavations of the megalithic tomb of Cocherel in Normandy had demonstrated the
existence of a Stone Age, agreed wholeheartedly with this three-age system. And
so did Goguet, the author of L’origine des lois, des arts et des sciences (1758) who
argued that humans had first been using tools made from stone, later from soft
metals like gold, silver and copper, and finally from iron (Grayson 1983: 13). By
the middle of the eighteenth century in France, many scholars were prepared to
accept a prehistoric era in which stone was used as the prime resource before the
advent of metal and several of them believed in a sequence of Stone, Bronze and
Iron Ages.
France provided the cultural ideal on which the Danish court and aristocracy
modelled itself and late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Scandinavian
scholarship was marked by a considerable French scientific import (Clarke 1968;
Trigger 1989: 74). Kraft’s Die Sitte der Wilden, for instance, was heavily inspired
by Lafitau’s Mœurs des sauvages américains. The extent to which Thomsen was
acquainted with these French scholars is not clear but it may have been considerable. In a letter to a German scholar in 1825, he spoke of ‘the validity of the old
notion of first stone, then copper, and finally iron’ (in Klindt-Jensen 1975: 52,
emphasis added). Thomsen’s three-age system came down to the systematic implementation of this old developmental scheme to an important but unordered
collection of ancient relics. Gräslund (1987: 13-6) has indicated how Denmark
and Sweden were the first countries to have substantial national collections of antiquities which were centralized in one place, instead of dispersed over provincial

The traditional defendant of the Scandinavian originality has been Glyn Daniel (1943; 1967). David
Clarke, however, in the excellent but somewhat forgotten historical introduction to his Analytical
Archaeology (1968: 4-11), has challenged this view by indicating the importance of Thomsen’s
conceptual forebears, a view which has increasingly won supporters (Gräslund 1981; 1987: 17-9;
Grayson 1983: 11-14; Trigger 1989: 75 and particularly Rodden 1981). Though Daniel accepted
the existence of some pre-nineteenth century predecessors, in later publications (1975; 1976) he still
praises the northern antiquaries as the founders of prehistoric archaeology and Thomsen as the one
‘who produced the revolution in antiquarian thought’ (1976: 41).

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49

Wunderkammer. Rather than deriving from ‘the genius of this one person’ (Daniel
1976: 41), it was more of a ‘historical accident’ (Clarke 1968: 10). The success of
this ‘bundle of ideas’ laid ‘in its acceptability—it was the right thing at the right
time’ (Rodden 1981: 65).
Yet there were differences. The work of Thomsen and Worsaae had far less universalist pretensions than that of the eighteenth-century philosophers. Inspired by
the Romantic quest for a national past, Danish antiquarian interest was largely fed
by a patriotic motivation, especially since international politics had challenged the
very concept of Danish identity (Klindt-Jensen 1975: 58-61; Kristiansen 1981;
Trigger 1989: 74). Providing an intelligible framework for the Northern past was
the prime ambition, not the fabrication of a narrative on the origin and development of human civilization. Thomsen did never argue that all regions of the world
had gone through a similar succession of Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages. The threeage system simply served as a local classification for Scandinavian prehistory, and
it was only at a later stage and through the work of other scholars that it became
a global sequence.
Parallel to this preference of the local over the global, there was a preference of
migration over evolution. Whereas eighteenth-century speculations explained the
different stages of humanity’s development as a natural succession, Thomsen and
Worsaae regarded the Bronze and Iron Age as the result of accidental invasions
(Daniel 1975: 45; Stocking 1987: 72). The universal stratum of the Stone Age
had ended abruptly with the invasion of a new race with much higher technological standards; and this race was eventually to be replaced by another people who
possessed the knowledge of iron metallurgy. Terms from Thomsen’s seminal paper
(1836; translated 1848) such as ‘imitation’, ‘international connexions’, ‘traffic’,
‘emigration to the North’ make clear that his concern was with regional diffusion
and migration rather than universal evolution.
In sum, the sequence stone-bronze-iron was old, but the explanation of it
was new. For Thomsen the three ages did not represent three stages of successive
growth. Nonetheless, an implicit distinction was drawn between the Stone Age on
the one hand and the Bronze and Iron Age on the other. Since polished stone axes
from Denmark were comparable with specimens from across Europe and since
they could still be found among present-day overseas savages, the Stone Age was
believed to represent a universal primeval stage. But golden lunulae, bronze lurae
and iron rapiers were finds with very few counterparts beyond the Danish peat
bogs and were thus attributed to local processes. The dualism between the Stone
and the metal ages was one of universal nature versus local culture, of slow process
versus rapid change, and of evolution versus migration and diffusion. The threeage system thus came down to a two-stage view of human development.
Clearly, such dualism heavily influenced the use of ethnographic analogy: for
the Stone Age it could be useful, for the metal ages it was to no avail. Thomsen
noted that the earliest inhabitants of Denmark which had belonged to the Age of
Stone ‘must have borne a resemblance to savages’ (1848: 64). Comparisons could
be drawn for the Stone Age as this was a universal phenomenon. In letter to a
Polish colleague, he wrote that in the earliest period great parts of Europe were ‘in-

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habited by actually very similar and very primitive races’ which ‘correspond[ed] to
the wild North Americans in many respects’ (in Rodden 1981: 58). Worsaae pointed to the peoples of the South Seas to illustrate that stone tools could be used as efficient
imple­ments (Daniel 1967: 99). He also used contemporary descriptions of Brazilian
Indians felling a tree as indications for prehistoric wood-cutting (Klindt-Jensen 1981).
This taken-for-granted parallel between Stone Age people in the past and in the present
was also reflected in both Thomsen’s and Worsaae’s museum layouts. Thomsen placed
Danish flint axes side by side to South Pacific hafted stone axes. Worsaae, too, after his
ap­pointment as museum director in 1865, arranged the ethnographic artefacts so as to
be of value as comparative material for the Scandinavian prehistoric artefacts (KlindtJensen 1976). But compared to Lafitau, Goguet and Kraft who had each built an entire
histoire universelle de l’homme on the basis of ethnographic parallels, the Scandinavian
antiquaries were far more parsimonious in the use of the comparative method (Ravn
1993; Klindt-Jensen 1976; 1981). It only served to explain the function, efficiency, and
hafting of stone tools.
Despite its local emphasis, the three-age system started to be applied across
Europe in the subsequent decades. Bruzelius introduced it to Sweden, Lisch to
Germany, Wilson to Scotland and Keller to Switzerland. It became the unitary
framework for understanding similarities and differences in European prehistory.
To understand its role in the Anglo-Saxon world and the impact it made on the
use of ethnographic parallels, we have to study the work of Sven Nilsson and
Daniel Wilson.

The dualism of Sven Nilsson and Daniel Wilson
Few authors are at first sight so divergent as Sven Nilsson and Daniel Wilson. The one
was a Swedish biologist, deeply rooted in the Enlightenment study of natural history,
the other a Scottish antiquarian involved with the Romanticist study of the national
past. And yet a comparison of their intellectual works is promising, as both enriched the
Danish three-age system with ethnographic reasoning. On top of that, both were read
by the younger generation of social evolutionists and influenced them to a considerable
extent. Nilsson was translated into English by no one less than John Lubbock himself.
Wilson was at least studied by the evolutionists, and his impact may have been larger
than traditionally assumed (Kehoe 1998). In a sense, it is fair to say that the work of
Nilsson and Wilson functioned as a bridge, both in time and by theme, between the
Danish antiquarians and the British evolutionists. In time, since their work spans the
second quarter of the nineteenth century. In theme, since it moved from artifact classification to cultural reconstruction.

Wilson’s contribution to the emergence of prehistoric archaeology is still a matter of debate.
Generally forgotten in brief historical reviews, Alice Kehoe (1991; 1998) has recently brought him
out from behind Lubbock’s shadow who is generally accredited the role of inventor of the discipline.
Her argument is that Wilson did not have the social and academic credentials to belong to the
London circles where Lubbock’s star shone, that he, however, played a foundational role, that he
coined the term prehistory, but that he was forced into overseas exile since no academic posts were
available to him in Britain. In her view, Lubbock would even have plagiarized some of his work (but
see Trigger 1994 for a sharp reply).

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51

Sven Nilsson is one of the most intriguing and at the same time most poorly understood personalities in the history of archaeology, perhaps simply because he was not an
archaeologist in the strict sense like Thomsen and Worsaae were. As a zoologist who
had studied under Cuvier, he became professor of zoology and director of the zoological museum in Lund and dominated Swedish biology during the first half of the century. Ever since Linnaeus, Sweden had become an important country for natural history
and taxonomy and Nilsson had won his spurs with several volumes on Scandinavian
fauna, particularly birds, molluscs and fishes. As an introduction to a new edition of his
standard work on the fauna of Scandinavia in 1834, he wrote an essay which dealt with
the life of prehistoric hunters and fishers. He expanded these ideas and inserted a long
treaty on the origin of the Nordic Bronze Age in his Skandinaviska Nordens Ur-invånare,
published between 1838 and 1843. In 1863 the section on the Bronze Age was translated into German; in 1868 the section on the Stone Age appeared in English, as well as
a French translation of the entire work. Lubbock’s English translation appeared under
the title The Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia: An Essay on Comparative Ethnography
(Nilsson 1868).
Daniel Wilson, an antiquary whose early interests had been in the urban history of his hometown Edinburgh, published Prehistoric Annals of Scotland (1851)
and, after his move to North-America, Prehistoric Man (1862), works which
brought together all available facts on prehistory in Scotland and North-America.
Written a century after Robertson’s History of Scotland from 1751 and History
of America from 1777, Wilson’s books could be regarded as the archaeological
pendants to these. Yet Wilson was no product of the Scottish Enlightenment.
It is telling that on the rare occasions he refers to one of his compatriots, it is to
the epitome of Scottish romanticism, Sir Walter Scott, rather than to any of the
Enlightenment thinkers. Wilson belonged to this first generation of archaeologists
who, though heirs to the Enlightenment, were more directly driven by the spirit
of romanticism and patriotism which had also characterized Danish antiquaries
(Kehoe 1998: 4-20). He was a devoted scholar who wanted to bring archaeology
beyond the stage of a ‘frivolous pastime’, ‘solemn trifling’ and ‘popular trammels’
(1851: I, xxiv) in order to establish its value as ‘the indispensable basis of all written history’ (I, xx).
How did both authors relate to the three-age system? Nilsson was acquainted
with the system and used concepts like Stone, Bronze and Iron Age, though he
affirmed his relative independence from Thomsen (1868: xlvii). His classification
of artefacts was first of all functional, not typochronological, assigning tools to
categories such as ‘implements for hunting and fishing’, ‘carpenter’s or mechanic’s
tools’ and ‘ornaments’. Nilsson stressed that antiquities represented ‘the fragments
of a progressive series of civilization, and that the human race has always been,
and still is, steadily advancing in civilization’ (lvii). ‘A progressive series of civilization’, ‘the human race’, ‘steadily advancing’, how different does this sound after
reading Thomsen! Nilsson was much more indebted to the eighteenth-century
developmentalists than his Danish colleagues. He firmly believed in the unity of

The best work on Nilsson has regrettably remained untranslated from Swedish (Regnéll 1983).

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from primitives to primates

the human race and the superiority of civilization: ‘Nations spring into existence,
and in their turn, decline and fall; but civilisation and humanity are steadily progressing’ (lix). Adopting the gradualist theory of socio-economic growth set forth
by Turgot, Smith and Ferguson, he said that ‘every nation has had, or has, four
stages to pass through’ (lxiv) and described the hunting and fishing, pastoral, agricultural and commercial stages of civilization (Kuper 1988: 64).
As can be expected, Wilson’s intellectual connection was first of all with
Thomsen and Worsaae. In his first monograph, he said that the ‘Danish antiquaries have surpassed all others in the value and extent of their researches’ (1851: I,
10). Worsaae was called ‘the eminent Danish antiquary’ (I, 21) and Thomsen’s
method provided ‘the foundation for Archaeology as a science’ (I, 23). Wilson
clearly believed that the system of arranging Nordic antiquities was ‘also applicable to those of Britain’ (I, 23). And after Worsaae visited Edinburgh and reorganized the collections of the Society of Antiquaries (Kehoe 1998: 16), it is no surprise that the structure of Wilson’s Prehistoric Annals of Scotland closely reflected
the three-age system—which he added with a fourth part for the Christian period.
The three-age system thus supplied Wilson with a scheme intelligible enough
to classify relics from prehistoric handaxes to medieval torture instruments. He
favourably cited Nilsson’s work on the Nordic Bronze Age, but did not consider
his broader evolutionist and ethnographic premises. It was the early Scandinavian
archaeologists who supplied the soil in which Wilson planted his own research.
Despite the different use of the three-age system, Nilsson and Wilson concurred in reproducing its inherent dualism which set the Stone Age apart from the
metal ages. Nilsson agreed with Thomsen and Worsaae on the universality of the
Stone Age: ‘Every nation, even those most anciently civilised, has had its Stone
Age’ (1868: 191). And Wilson literally named the Stone Age a ‘primeval period’
through which ‘most, perhaps all nations have passed’ (1851: I, 41). Wilson forcefully defended this dualism. According to him, the subject matter of the Stone
Age was ‘the history, not of men, but of man; not of nations but of the race’ (I,
1). Later ages, on the other hand, were characterized by successive migrations
and showed the result of ‘hardy colonists’ (I, 11). In this stage, progress was no
longer an independent development, but brought about by external influences
of ‘primitive colonists of Europe corresponding to successive stages of advancement in civilisation’ (I, 13). Nilsson’s work shows the same discrepancy. After
his developmentalist work on the prehistoric hunters and fishers in Scandinavia
(1838-1843), his essay on the origin of the Nordic Bronze Age took a very different perspective (1863). Studying the petrographs from Kivik in South Sweden,
he argued that these resulted from an ancient sun cult which had been imported
by Phoenician merchants trading bronze for Baltic amber. Now that Nilsson was
dealing with the metal ages, evolutionism was replaced by diffusionism; cultural
change was no longer explained in terms of gradual progress but migrating merchants; and universal growth had been substituted by historical connection. This
dualism would inevitably affect the use of ethnographic analogies.

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53

Comparative ethnography, folklore and ‘the parallax of man’
Compared to the Danish antiquaries, both Nilsson and Wilson were in favour of a greater contribution of ethnography, though for different reasons. In the case of Nilsson,
his biological background proved decisive. Though much of his language resonates
Enlightenment philosophy, he was more directly influenced by the zoology of Georges
Cuvier, the founding father of palaeontology. Cuvier had developed the method of comparative anatomy on the maxim that understanding an extinct species required comparison of its skeletal morphology with that of present animals. Cuvier was a master in such
reasoning; he could reconstruct the entire skeleton of an ‘antediluvial’ species on the
basis of a single bone alone. Nilsson’s ‘comparative ethnography’—the term was given
in the title of his work (1838-1834)—was an expansion of this comparative anatomy to
the cultural realm. He literally said that in his archaeological work he had at hand ‘the
comparative method of instruction, which, under the guidance of the illustrious Baron
Cuvier, had been adopted in works on zoology’ (1868: xlviii):
If natural philosophy has been able to seek out in the earth and to discover the
fragments of an animal kingdom, which perished long before man’s appearance
in the world, and, by comparing the same with existing organisms, to place them
before us almost in a living state, then also ought this science to be able, by availing itself of the same comparative method, to collect the remains of human races
long since passed away, and of the works which they have left behind, to draw a
parallel between them and similar ones, which still exist on earth, and thus cut
out a way to the knowledge of circumstances which have been, by comparing
them with those which still exist. It is by following this method that we shall begin
to investigate this subject. (lx-lxi)

The point could not be clearer: like in comparative anatomy, the comparative
ethnographer was to juxtapose his Stone Age artefacts ‘with similar objects still
existing and still in use’ (lxi).
Wilson’s enthusiasm for ethnography emerged in a different context. Initially,
the role of analogy was as narrow as it had been with Thomsen and Worsaae, i.e.
that of illustrating Stone Age tools. In his first work, his advice for redesigning the
British Museum echoed the displays of the Copenhagen museum:
Were an entire quadrangular range of apartments in the British Museum devoted
to a continuous systematic arrangement, the visitor should pass from the ethnographic rooms, showing man as he is still found in the primitive savage state,
and destitute of the metallurgic arts; thence to the relics of the Stone Period, not
of Britain or Europe only, but also of Asia, Africa, and America, including the
remarkable primitive traces which even Egypt discloses. (1851: I, xxv)

Yet after his move to North America—Wilson was appointed professor of history in Toronto in 1853 (Kehoe 1991)—ethnography became the loudly heralded
cornerstone of his investigations. This move to the New World, though some

Quite independently, Hegardt (1996) has reached a similar conclusion; see also the work of Regnéll
(1983).

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from primitives to primates

times experienced as an intellectual exile, widened his archaeological vision. In
Prehistoric Man from 1862, Wilson reflected on this new context in a somewhat
awkward third person account:
The author had already familiarized himself with the unwritten chronicles of
Europe’s infancy and youth, when unexpectedly transplanted among the colonists
of another continent, and within reach of aboriginal tribes of the American forests. “The eye sees what it brings the power to see;” and in these he discovered objects of interest on many grounds, but chiefly from the fact that he soon perceived
he had already realized much in relation to a long obliterated past of Britain’s
and Europe’s infancy, which was here reproduced in living reality before his eyes.
(1862: xxiii).

Wilson was perhaps the first since Lafitau who so explicitly claimed that a study
of American natives could enhance the understanding of Europe’s past, because
like the French Jesuit he had access to first-hand ethnographic evidence. Time and
again he stressed how ‘America has much to disclose in illustration of primitive
history’ (14), a statement which reverberates Locke’s adage, ‘In the beginning all
the world was America’.
The contribution of ethnography, however, remained generally limited to
Stone Age studies. This is very clear from comparing Nilsson’s essay on hunters
and fishers with his work on the Bronze Age. In the first, he endeavoured ‘by a
new method, to gain a knowledge on the first inhabitants of the Scandinavian
Peninsula’ (1868: lvii) and this consisted of enquiring ‘whether similar implements are still in use amongst savage tribes now living’ (2). But in the latter, he
abandoned comparative ethnography and turned to a study of European folklore.
For more recent periods, he reasoned, much more could be learnt from the traditions still prevalent on the European countryside than from exotic customs. He
thus interpreted the sun worship of the Phoenicians by reference to certain fire rituals in contemporary Ireland, believing that these were remnants of pagan times.
Nilsson wrote: ‘Aus diesem Gesichtspunkt ist die Untersuchung des Volksaberglaubens
für den Ethnographen von Wichtigkeit, um die älteste Geschichte des Stammes zu entwirren’ (Nilsson 1863: 32). The interest for modern superstitions and irrational
traditions as clues for European prehistory is an early example of what Tylor eventually called ‘the study of survivals’.
The dualism between the Stone Age and the metal ages came down to Nilsson’s
methodological contrast between comparative ethnography and folklore studies.
Ethnography could be invoked as long as the Stone Age was considered a period
‘out of time’ where historical phenomena had no hold. The Stone Age thus resembled the primeval état de la nature postulated by eighteenth-century scholars
like Rousseau. It showed humanity in its most natural condition, while the later
phases of prehistory exemplified mankind in different cultural traditions. Wilson
agreed wholeheartedly: ethnography was especially helpful for the oldest, most
natural periods. Since his prime aim was ‘to view Man, as far as possible unaffected by those modifying influences which accompany the development of nations’,

the comparative method

55

he turned without hesitance to ‘the Red-Man, indigenous, seemingly aboriginal,
and still in what is customary to call a state of nature’ (1862: xix, 4).
Yet what was the purpose of these ethnographic analogies? In fact, an interesting development can be seen. Originally, ethnography was simply invoked to
illustrate Stone Age implements. This was the case with Wilson’s suggestions for
the British Museum, it was the method favoured by Thomsen and Worsaae, and
it was also supported by Nilsson’s comparative ethnography. In his catalogue of
Scandinavian artefacts, Nilsson gave first descriptions (distilled from reports by
travellers and missionaries) of the tools used by savages, followed by presentations of archaeological specimens. Wilson drew similar ethnographic parallels for
prehistoric stone tools, canoes, querns and megaliths. Scottish flint knives were
compared with the ones found in the Mississippi valley mounds; stone axes with
specimens form the South Sea islands and the American north-west coast; perforated stone tools with the ones fabricated by the Shoshone Indians; and wood
combs with their Inuit equivalents. Mostly these parallels were simply mentioned.
Juxtaposing prehistoric and present tools was believed to elucidate somehow
their fabrication and function. Sometimes a more explicit inference was drawn.
This was the case for the small, enigmatic stone cups Wilson had encountered in
Scottish collections which presented a ‘striking analogy’ to a class of stone vessels still in use in the Faroe Islands as oil lamps (1851: I, 208). Wilson believed
that, considering the similarity of form and decoration and the proximity of the
Faroe Islands to Scotland, the prehistoric specimen must also have been used as
oil lamps, although perhaps more in ‘mysterious rites of the so-called Druidical
temples’ (I, 209) than in mundane domestic contexts (figure 4).
Later, however, ethnographic analogy started to address much broader issues, such
as the extent of primitive culture or the degree of civilization. Nilsson regretted that ‘not
even one of the savage nations now living has yet been studied or described from a truly
scientific, that is to say, from a comparative ethnological point of view’ (1868: 3) so that
his study was limited to tools. Wilson, however, once in North-America, could observe
‘an interesting phase of primitive social life’ (1862: 21). According to him, the American
natives were ‘a parallax of man, already viewed in Europe’s prehistoric dawn’ (xxiii) and
represented ‘man in the initial stages of savage life’ (1). A fuller understanding of contemporary savagery held many promises for prehistoric reconstruction beyond technology,
but to draw the implications of such awareness was quite a step further than interpreting
oil lamps. Wilson started his chapter on the European Palaeolithic with the remark that
American Indians supplied ‘very significant analogies to recently discovered works of art
of the cave-breccias and the drift’ (22), but refrained from drawing any precise inferences. Despite the enthusiasm, Wilson’s Prehistoric Man is therefore rather disappointing
in terms of elaborate ethnographical parallels. Though Wilson did not quite realize his
ambition, the idea that ethnographic analogy could do more than explain stone tools had
nonetheless been set. And would be developed by the evolutionists after him.

The promise of ethnographic parallels had also a rhetorical function. Presenting his compendium of
American artefacts as ‘researches into the origin of civilisation in the Old and the New World’, as Wilson’s
subtitle read, was perhaps a way of drawing European attention to the work of an exiled researcher in
North-America.

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from primitives to primates

Figure 4. Wilson compared stone vessels (left) found in Scotland with oil lamps still in use on
the Faroe Islands (right). General shape and decoration were believed to be sufficiently similar
to infer an analogous function. His piecemeal use of analogy on the basis of formal similarity
was exemplary for the first half of the nineteenth century (Wilson 1851: I, 207, 208)

The quality of the more piecemeal analogies depended on the similarity between source and target. Hence the insistence on resemblance. Wilson stressed the
likenesses between Faroer and Scottish oil lamps. According to Nilsson (1868),
one tool had to be ‘exactly like’ another (28), ‘perfectly similar’ (101), of ‘the very
same kind’ (100), or ‘surprisingly similar [...] in the most minute details’ (104).
It seemed sometimes as if two tools ‘had been made by the same hand and on
the same day’ (104). Nilsson’s analogies worked from ‘the similarity, or rather
identity’ (l) between present and prehistoric tools. The most elaborate example
was his comparison of Scandinavian passage-graves with Eskimo dwelling-houses.
He pointed to the ‘most surprising similarity’ (132) and ‘unmistakeable [sic] resemblance’ (141) of the monuments which were ‘identical in all essentials’ (134):
‘One cannot but be astonished, when reading the description of our Scandinavian
gallery-graves, to find it applicable, almost word for word, to the Greenland huts’
(135).
But what did this similarity mean? Did it suggest that implements or monuments had belonged to one and the same tribe? Nilsson said: ‘We must, after a
strict examination, answer No; they only indicate the same degree of civilisation’
(103). Technology was an indicator of overall progress; technological similarity
meant moral or intellectual similarity so that ‘the people who, in Scandinavia,
made use of similar implements, stood in the same low degree of civilisation as
these savages’ (100; cf. 2). Since there was ‘not the least sign’ of Inuits inhabiting Scandinavia, ‘the similarity [between graves and houses] must be ascribed to
the fact that they were in the same grade of civilisation’ (141). Formal similarity
determined the quality of the analogy and indicated the broader degree of civilization. Wilson (1851; 1862), however, took a different perspective: according to
him, similarities of form generally indicated migration, invasion or diffusion, and
he assembled historical, archaeological and ethnographic data to show that such
long-distance travels had been possible by the use of canoes.
Yet the question remained for both: why did savage tribes, so diverse in time and
space, sometimes come up with such similar tool kits? They must do so ‘instinctively, and
in consequence of a sort of natural necessity’, Nilsson suggested (104). To him, at least,

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57

this revealed ‘the evidence of a higher Wisdom’ (105). Wilson, too, agreed that global
similarity was explained by ‘some cause operating naturally at a certain stage of development in the human mind’ (1851: I, 147-8), which was related to his view of the history
of civilization as ‘successive ideas of the Divine Creator thought out into a recorded actuality’ (II, 528). It would lead too far to discuss early nineteenth-century definitions
of Divinity, but it should be kept in mind that the notions of ‘higher Wisdom’
and ‘Divine Creator’ used by Nilsson and Wilson are not necessarily biblical, but
may be spiritualist, rationalist, or Aristotelian.10 The important point to note is that
they reasoned from similarity and this was explained in terms of degree of civilization,
migration, and divine actualization.

An important device
In the wake of the three-age system and before the establishment of human
antiquity, archaeological ideas were not framed by one consistent paradigm.
Enlightenment ideas on growth, progress and ‘man in the natural state’ went hand
in hand with notions reminiscent of the theological tradition like the unity of the
human race, the dispersion of the human family and divine revelation, as well as
with a Romanticist interest in national history. Classical texts were still a major
source of inspiration for explaining the more recent invasions, trade networks and
migrations. To the modern eye, the pages of Nilsson’s and Wilson’s books may
show contradictions between invading races on the one hand and the evolving
human race on the other, but the fact that it was not experienced as such by the
authors says something of the dualist perspective in which they worked.
Despite obvious differences, Nilsson and Wilson paralleled each other in a
number of respects. Both the rationalist zoologist and the romanticist antiquary
were acquainted with the three-age system of the Copenhagen antiquaries (though
Wilson’s enthusiasm was greater); both had come to it from an external point of
view (zoology in Lund; antiquarianism in Edinburgh); both extrapolated it to
another region (Sweden and Scotland); both put the Stone Age apart from the
other periods (as a universal epoch); both treated this epoch in evolutionist terms
(as opposed to diffusionist terms for the later periods); both injected the study
of this earliest period with ethnography; and both regarded global similarities
as signs of divine action. Nilsson’s stay in Paris where he worked under Cuvier
had been decisive in formulating his comparative ethnography; so had Wilson’s
stay in Toronto where he could observe American Indians in vivo. Yet a previous
acquaintance with Thomsen’s notion of a Stone Age was essential. Their views
can be compared with that of their contemporaries who had not been exposed
to the three-age system. To take the most famous example: to the young naturalist Darwin whose early interests were more in biology and geology than antiquarianism, the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego which he visited in the 1830s
did not once remind him of some ancestral relics. This idea only surfaced in the
10 Wilson’s ‘recorded actuality’ echoes the Aristotelian concept of God whose creation is an actualized
version ofhis potential. Wilson worked, however, with the temporalized version of this scheme as we
know it since the late eighteenth century, like in Hegel’s phenomenology (Lovejoy 1936).

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Descent of Man, written forty years later in the midst of the socioevolutionist climax (1871: II, 404). Unaware of the idea of a universal Stone Age, young Darwin
did not yet think of ethnographic analogues.
In the work of these two rather ‘marginal’ scholars (in geographical and disciplinary respect), ethnographic analogy had become an important device for illustrating and interpreting stone tools. Though Wilson tried to broaden the application, wholesale projections were still not made. Before 1860, the anthropological
significance of contemporary savagery ‘tended to be of primarily descriptive antiquarian or humanitarian interest’ (Stocking 1974a: 414). Source analogues could
be simply picked out in a piecemeal fashion since modern Stone Age people belonged to the homogeneous substrate of savageness.
The analogies drawn rested on one and the same principle, i.e. that of similarity. Nilsson (1868: 103) was inspired by ‘the great resemblance that exists amongst
the stone implements of nations of different tribes, during very different periods
and in the most distant countries of the earth.’ And Wilson wrote: ‘There are
modern as well as ancient prehistoric races; and both are available for solving the
problem of man’s true natural condition’ (1862: I, 3). Stone Age people in the
present did not just resemble the ones from the past, they equalled them. They
were instances of the same natural kind: savagery. Modern examples of it, unaffected by civilization, did literally ‘re-present’ the past, i.e. they showed the past
in the present. In logical terms, the American Indians, the inhabitants of the
South Sea Islands, and the ‘Esquimaux’ were sources believed to be identical to
the target. It sufficed to simply juxtapose present and past implements in order to
explain them. A small amount of similarity, mostly in tool form, was considered
sufficient for inferring the degree of civilization.
If the Stone Age was accepted as a world-wide phenomenon, it should not be
forgotten that in Britain by the middle of the nineteenth century its time depth
was still very shallow, comprising at maximum some thousands of years. Another
prerequisite for the emergence of ‘social evolutionism’ demanded the unambiguous establishment of a high human antiquity. A year before Lyell’s famous coup de
grâce to the short chronology appeared, Wilson had written: ‘Time is the element
most frequently required in the hypotheses of the ethnologist’ (1862: I, 111). The
ethnologist was given it, more than generously.

The antiquity of man and early social evolutionism
In contrast to Nilsson and Wilson, thinkers like Tylor, Spencer, Morgan, Lubbock,
Pitt Rivers, Maine, and McLennan have received more scholarly interest from historians of science (Murphree 1961; Burrow 1966; Harris 1968: 142-216; Nisbet
1969: 159-208; Mandelbaum 1971: 93-111; Stocking 1974a; 1987; Ingold 1986;
Kuper 1988; Bowler 1988: 133-41; 1989: 30-9; 1990: 190-201; Sanderson 1990:
10-35). Regarded as the epitomes of social evolutionism between 1860 and 1880,
these authors are generally treated as closely related members of the same family
who have a lot in common: exponents of the Victorian epoch firmly rooted in
the London scientific circles (Morgan excepted) after the publication of Darwin’s

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59

Origin of Species, most of them shared the beliefs in the psychic unity of mankind
(as against the polygenist school), in overall progress, in the slow, gradualist, uniform and law-like nature of this progress, in the unilinear trajectory of progressive
growth, in independent invention as the basic mechanism of this growth, in the
differential extent of progress among contemporary societies, in the possibility of
arranging these societies in a hierarchical sequence from simple to complex and
from savage to civilized, in technological attainment as the first criterion for establishing such hierarchy, in the comparative method as a means of attesting previous
stages of an advanced society, and in the study of survivals as a verification of the
ladder of sociocultural complexity. These indeed can be called the basic tenets of
classical evolutionism (cf. Stocking 1974a: 409; 1987: 170).
However, if it were all that simple there would not have been such elaborate scholarship on the theme. The above sketch is a caricature based on the most classical evolutionist writings like Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877)
and Spencer’s Principles of Sociology (1876-1896).11 Many authors diverged from such
an ideal-typical portrayal.12 This holds especially true for the comparative method. This
methodological pivot of Victorian social evolutionism has often been treated as a single,
unified principle, illustrated by a few hackneyed quotes from Lubbock and Tylor. This
is unfortunate since there was a lot of variety and change through time. In this and the
following section, I shall not confine myself to the few theoretical lines in evolutionist
writings. Drawing attention to the actual applications of comparative reasoning will allow a better understanding of the development of the comparative method.

The first generation of social evolutionists
It is now generally acknowledged that not the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species
in 1859, but the establishment of human antiquity triggered the sudden emergence of
social evolutionist thought in Britain. Though authors like Lubbock and Spencer were
in touch with the naturalist science of Darwin and though the evolutionists sided themselves with the Darwinian revolution and its rejection of religious dogmatism, intellectually, social evolutionism developed independently from Darwinian principles (Murphree
1961; Ingold 1986: 14; Bowler 1988: 134-5; 1989: 34; 1990: 191). Nuclear tenets of
Darwin’s theory (such as random variation, selective pressure, differential survival, nonlinear change, minimal role of teleology) are totally absent in the works of Lubbock,
Tylor, Morgan and all the others.13 Instead, the principle of unilinear progress, the idea
of directional laws (Mandelbaum 1971: 111), and the belief in immanent, necessary and
natural change (Nisbet 1969: 166-88) we find with the evolutionists is much more in
line with Lamarckian orthogenesis and eighteenth-century developmentalism than with
11 Sanderson (1990) presents a recent example of such schematic view of social evolutionism.
12 Stocking’s Victorian Anthropology (1987) was first of all an attempt to show the diversity of contemporary social thought (cf. Stocking 1974a). In his discussion of individual authors, Stocking
constantly seems to have the prototype of social evolutionism in mind as a yardstick against which
their contributions are measured.
13 Recently, Sanderson (1990: 30) has argued that Tylor and Morgan both had ‘a loose kind of naturalselection conception’. The evidence for this is thin. Bowler (1988: 138) was probably much closer to
the truth when he compared evolutionism with the ‘anti-Darwinian theory of orthogenesis’.

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Darwinian ‘descent with modification’ (Stocking 1987: 178; Bowler 1988: 139). 14 It is,
therefore, better to speak of Darwinians than of Darwinists to indicate the group of loyal
but idiosyncratic followers, and to indicate their theory as evolutionist rather than evolutionary (Sanderson 1990: 3).
Not the writings from an old man in Kent but the discoveries of some young geologists in Devon made the evolutionist wheel spin. This is the conclusion reached by several
historians of science after studying the impact of the excavations at Brixham Cave where
proof was obtained for humanity’s existence in geological times (Gruber 1965; Grayson
1983; Trautmann 1992; Van Riper 1993). The establishment of human antiquity was
experienced by its contemporaries not only as a sudden revolution in geology, but also in
palaeontology, prehistoric archaeology and anthropology (Van Riper 1993: 192-221).15
In the first edition of Prehistoric Man (1862), Wilson included a chapter simply called
‘Guesses at the Age of Man’; the second edition (1865) already spoke firmly in favour
of ‘the traces of a period irreconcilable with any received system of historic chronology’
(29). Next to a new edition of Wilson’s work, the year 1865 saw the publication of three
highly influential books: Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times, Tylor’s Early History of Mankind
and McLennan’s Primitive Marriage; three volumes which can be rightly seen as laying
the foundations of prehistoric archaeology, sociocultural anthropology and comparative
law respectively. All three were heavily indebted to the enormous expansion of human
chronology. Besides the long chapters which Lubbock spent paraphrasing Lyell, time
was the key feature around which all the explanations of technological development, of
moral and intellectual progress, of the growth of social institutions and historical customs pivoted: the Enlightenment idea of progress could now finally be considered from
a long term perspective. There was, therefore, an intimate connection between the high
antiquity of humanity and the low condition it once had: ‘In reaching a time indefinitely
more remote,’ McLennan (1869: 523) said, ‘we have come on a condition of man indefinitely lower.’
Apart from time, geology also provided a method and a metaphor for thinking about
social evolution, to the extent that the nascent field of prehistoric archaeology has even
been entitled ‘geological archaeology’ (Van Riper 1993: 185).16 ‘The archaeologist can
only follow the methods which have been so successfully pursued in geology,’ Lubbock
14 For an alternative reading, see Weber (1974) who holds, rather idiosyncratically, that social evolutionism was more immediately influenced by early nineteenth-century biology than by eighteenthcentury philosophy. Even if this may have been a source upon which the evolutionists drew, in
the end their conclusions resembled still more the Enlightenment tradition. Stocking (1987: 178)
has rightly said: ‘In filling the void in cultural time with the data of contemporary savagery, they
were carried back into close contact with an earlier developmental tradition, to which their own
sociocultural evolutionism was in many respects closer than it was to Darwinism.’ And Nisbet went
so far as to state: ‘The theory of social evolution is no more than the eighteenth-century theory of natural
history—broadened, extended, ramified, and filled with a volume of ethnographic data not known to such
men as Ferguson, Smith, and Rousseau’ (1969: 165).
15 In fact, it had been the result of a long process but the final blow was often represented as the only
one.
16 He thus set it apart from ‘historical archaeology’ which dealt with the periods still referred to by
classical texts. The study of prehistory lay at first in ‘a no-man’s-land between geology and historical
archaeology’ (Van Riper 1993: 192). This is where the geological archaeologists would pick it up.
Lubbock (1865: 2), the unofficial spokesperson of them, stated: ‘Archaeology forms, in fact, the link
between geology and history.’

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wrote (1865: 339). In view of such a bottomless past, the authority of classical sources
decreased. Tylor criticized the ‘undue confidence in the statements of ancient writers’
(1865: 2). And for McLennan philologists had to be contented ‘to act as assistants rather
than as principals’ (1865: 7). Other sources comparable to direct geological evidence
were now to be invoked. The law historian Maine (1861: 3) held that ‘rudimentary ideas
are to the jurist what the primary crusts of the earth are to the geologist.’ And in a famous
phrase, Lubbock (1865: 336) said that present savages ‘are to the antiquary, what the
opossum and the sloth are to the geologist’.
The crucial books published in 1865 each stressed the importance of ethnography. After ten chapters on European prehistory and the antiquity of man,
Lubbock’s influential Pre-Historic Times continued with three chapters on ‘modern savages’, meant ‘to throw some light on the remains of savage life in ages long
gone by’ (1865: viii). He entirely concurred with Nilsson’s derivation of comparative ethnography from comparative anatomy, ‘the rude bone- and stone-implements of bygone ages being to the one, what the remains of extinct animals are to
the other’ (336). Tylor’s Researches into the Early History of Mankind started from
the premise that present-day civilization was not intelligible without considering
its historical development, but since much material lay ‘out of the beaten track of
history’, one needed ‘indirect evidence’ (1865: 4). Tylor thus based his researches
on the available ethnographic literature on ‘the lower races up and down in the
world’ (1). For ‘matters of practical life’ contemporary savages ‘may be nothing
to us’, he said, but reading about them helped ‘completing the picture, and tracing out the course of life’ (2). In Ancient Law, the jurist McLennan criticized the
philological tradition of Maine and Bachofen for dealing with the origin of social
and legal institutions (Lowie 1937: 39-54). ‘The facts disclosed by philology [...]
cannot be said to tell us anything of the origin or early progress of civilization,’
he held, ‘for the features of primitive life, we must look [to the tribes] of Central
Africa, the wilds of America, the hills of India, and the islands of the Pacific’
(McLennan 1865: 5, 6).
All three authors accepted the unity of the human race and strongly believed
in progress, although for Lubbock and Tylor the underlying mechanism could
very well involve migration. Following Nilsson’s dualism, Lubbock said that migrations were ‘compatible only with a comparatively high state of organisation’
(1865: 476) and Tylor believed that explanations by independent invention had
‘no historical value’, while the ones based on diffusion and migration had this
‘in a high degree’ (1865: 5). Only McLennan supported the evolutionist tenet of
independent invention. Clearly, this divergence would influence the structure of
analogical reasoning. With their archaeological interests, Lubbock and Tylor evidently supported the three-age system, the sequence now being attested ‘in almost
every district of the habitable globe’ (Tylor 1865: 4). After the establishment of
human antiquity, the Stone Age was not only universal but also extremely long.
The road to more elaborate uses of the comparative method lay now open.

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The function of contemporary savagery
For the first generation of social evolutionists, the use of ethnographic parallels
was diverse and the logic of analogy was multifarious and often muddled. Reading
through the 1865 monographs of Lubbock, Tylor and McLennan, one comes
across a variety of purposes, strategies and applications which shows how the comparative method was far from being standardized at that stage.

Illustrating and explaining tools
The straightforward juxtaposition of prehistoric tools or monuments with recent
specimens remained a popular approach. Lubbock, in line with Nilsson, defended
this strategy:
If we wish clearly to understand the antiquities of Europe, we must compare them
with the rude implements and weapons still, or until lately, used by savage races
in other parts of the world. (1865: 336)

In Pre-Historic Times, Neolithic tumuli were compared to ‘the burial mound of
Oberea, in Otaheiti’ to show that people without metallurgical knowledge could
erect such constructions (1865: 110). The Swiss and Irish lake-dwellings were
flanked by a set of ethnographic parallels (122). Prehistoric burials of a woman
with an infant became more intelligible after an exposition on the ‘Esquimaux’
habit of burying their babies alive when the mother had deceased (116). The Inuit
were also invoked to show that eating foxes was not limited to the Swiss lake-inhabitants (141), nor that lingering faunal remains was restricted to cave-dwellers
in the Dordogne (256). The formation of Danish kjøkkenmøddings was similar
to modern shell-middens in Australia, the Malay Peninsula and especially Tierra
del Fuego (178). Indeed, Danish mound-dwellers must ‘have lived in very much
the same manner as the Tierra del Fuegians, who dwell on the coast, feed principally on shell-fish, and have the dog as their only domestic animal’ (189). The
function of such ethnographic parallels was nothing more than just illustrative.
Savagery being an a-temporal category, it could both be ‘illustrated by ancient
remains and the manners and customs of modern savages,’ as Lubbock’s subtitle
said. Prehistory was found in the soil of Europe and the soul of the savage.
However, on certain occasions the use of ethnography led to a genuine analogy. This
was especially the case for attributing functions to tools. Wondering what the function of Palaeolithic scrapers could be, Lubbock compared them with ‘Esquimaux’ tools
which were used as skin-scrapers. ‘The true nature and use of the ancient skin-scrapers has, however, been entirely explained by these modern specimens with which they
are absolutely identical,’ he concluded and added in good Victorian fashion that ‘the
method of preparing skins is curious and ingenious, but very disgusting’ (407, cf. 71).
Like with Wilson’s oil lamp, one attribute of the present source (the function of the
Inuit tool) was transferred to the past target (the Palaeolithic tool) on the basis of shared

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Figure 5. Lubbock’s compilation of ethnograhic evidence served to establish a common denominator of contemporary savagery. While indicating a hierarchy from simple to complex, it also showed that what was commonly shared had to be old (Lubbock 1865: 447)

Finding a common denominator
Illustrating tools and explaining their function had already been functions of ethnographic analogy before. But Lubbock went one step further. Pre-Historic Times
contained more than one hundred pages describing fourteen societies of ‘non-metallic savages’ (337). This ethnographic compendium was based on an armchair
reading of travellers’ accounts; it presented a tour d’horizon of what Lubbock saw
as the world’s lowest primitiveness, depicting with much juicy detail and moral
judgement the variation of savage life. Lubbock believed that the contemporary
wilds represented a general, if heterogeneous, state of savagery which could be
arranged from simple to complex. He presented a table of technological progress
(figure 5) reached by different savages which resulted in a hierarchy from least advanced (Easter Islanders, Fuegians, Bushmen, Hottentots and Andamaners) over
tolerably advanced (Australians, Esquimaux and North-American Indians) to well
advanced (New Zealanders, Feegeeans and other Pacific tribes).
17 Similar reasonings can be found in John Evans’ The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons, and Ornaments
of Great Britain (1872). Evans, once involved with the recognition of human antiquity and the rehabilitation of Boucher de Perthes, used ethnographic analogies to infer the function of prehistoric
stone tools. Less sweeping than Lubbock, his use of ethnographic evidence was more confined to
solving localized problems. He thus focused ‘less on the workings of Stone Age Europeans’ minds
than on the works of their hands’ (Van Riper 1993: 211).

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Though not always clear, Lubbock’s interest was in finding the basic commonalities of savage life. Because spears and clubs were the two tool types which
occurred among all contemporary savages and because such useful tools would
not be rapidly lost in the course of civilization, ‘they seem to be the only natural
and universal weapons of man’ (475). The more geographically spread an implement was, the more primeval it seemed. The argument was not limited to the
technological realm. Lubbock reasoned that because in general savages were cruel,
childlike and unfair to women and because most of them could not count up to
ten, trusted in witchcraft or even lacked a religious concept, this moral and mental inferiority was also projected into the past. For example: ‘That our earliest
ancestors could have counted to ten is very improbable, considering that so many
races now in existence cannot get beyond four’ (475). Though obsessed with the
extremes of savageness, Lubbock sought a common denominator between several
forms of savage life in order to find the primary technological, moral and mental
conditions.

Drawing developmental sequences
Establishing a hierarchy could also serve a different purpose because it allowed
to draw a developmental sequence. This is how Tylor worked. Arranging ethnographic, historical and archaeological evidence on a specific custom from simple to complex, he sought to establish conjectural sequences of cultural growth.
This is most clearly seen in Tylor’s discussion on the origin and development of
the use of fire (figure 6). Tylor started with ‘stories of fireless men in America’
(232) whose authenticity he suspected; he continued with ‘a kind of transitional
state’ of fire-using without fire-making, a condition which until recently would
have been found among the Tasmanians; he then proceeded to a discussion of
the art of making fire ‘between the rudest and most artificial way in which this
may be done’ (236): first, there was the ‘stick-and-groove’ technique, still found
in the South Sea Islands; then came the manual ‘fire-drill’, observable among
Australians, Mexicans, Veddahs and many other contemporary nations; this was
followed by a cord-drill, an implement still in use among the ‘Esquimaux’, later by
a bow-drill (present with the North-American Indians) and finally the pump-drill,
found among the Iroquois Indians and among English ‘china and glass menders’.
Every stage of this technological pedigree was illustrated with an engraving; it was
corroborated by textual and mythological evidence from the writings of Pliny,
Russian myths and Finnish poems. The methodological rationale underlying this
conjectural sequence was clearly outlined by Tylor:
A survey of the condition of the art in different parts of the world, as known to
us by direct evidence, is enough to make it probably that nearly all the different
processes found in use are the successors of ruder ones; and, beside this, there is a
mass of indirect evidence which fills up some of the shortcomings of history, as it
does in the investigation of the Stone Age. (1865: 236)

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Figure 6. (both pages) Tylor scanned ethnographic and archaeological data to outline a progressive
development in fire-making technology. According to him, it had developed from the stick-and-groove
technique, over the fire-drill, the cord-drill and the bow-drill to the pump-drill. This sequence, however, was not independently confirmed; it presented an assumed line of technological progress, irrespective of time or place. The ancient Mexicans and the modern Gauchos of the Pampas could therefore be
classified in the same level of using the fire-drill (Tylor 1865: figure 20-26, 29)

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The history of early civilization could thus be known by a carefully planned and
somewhat erratic expedition in Africa, America, Asia and Oceania. It was based
on the a priori assumption that the chronological order could be read off of the
logical order from simple to complex. So strong was the belief in progress that the
sequence drawn by Tylor ‘was not an order which had been established by independent chronological evidence, but was a function of the system of classification’
(Mandelbaum 1971: 106).

Broader applications
This logic was entirely followed by McLennan, safe that he applied it to bolder
themes. Not fire-making but the origin of bride-kidnapping and other marriage
ceremonies were addressed by him. Wilson’s suggestion that one could move beyond a study of tools received a full application in McLennan’s work on the development of social and legal customs. Contemporary ethnographic evidence could
do more than explaining technology:
These facts of to-day are, in a sense, the most ancient history. In the sciences of law
and society, old means not old in chronology, but in structure: that is most archaic
which lies nearest to the beginning of human progress considered as a development, and that is most modern which is farthest removed from that beginning.
[...]
The preface of general history must be compiled from the materials presented by
barbarism. Happily, if we may say so, these materials are abundant. So unequally
has the species been developed, that almost every conceivable phase of progress may
be studied, as somewhere observed and recorded. And thus the philosopher, fenced
from mistake, as to the order of development, by the interconnection of the stages
and their shading into one another by gentle gradations, may draw a clear and
decided outline of the course of human progress in times long antecedent to those
to which even philology can make reference. (McLennan 1865: 6)

The unity of the human race, the progressive nature of society, the unilinear
trajectory of progress, the unequal development of contemporary societies, the
methodology of using one stage of a present society as representative of another’s past state, the possibility of thus drawing a general history of mankind: it is
all argued here in a clarity of style unknown to Tylor and certainly to Lubbock.
Burrow appreciated this argument as ‘one of the clearest, most elaborate and least
apologetic of all the expositions of the principles of the Evolutionary Comparative
Method’ (1966: 233) and Stocking’s portrayed McLennan as being ‘more brilliant than Tylor or Lubbock, and more given to intellectual enthusiasm’ (1987:
168). McLennan’s notion of independent invention allowed to scan the world
for evidence which could fill the gaps of his unilinear progressionist trajectory.
Since contemporary societies had ‘not advanced in civility pari passu’ (1865: 9),
it was possible to arrange them into a sequence of progressive growth with gentle
overlaps.

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Ritualized customs
A final means of using contemporary evidence to enhance an understanding of
the past was somewhat more peculiar as it entailed information from the civilized world. Stone tools could be adequately explained by exotic specimens, but
social and legal history required richer data for comprehension. Both Tylor and
McLennan believed, therefore, that ritualized customs in our own society corresponded to older realities. ‘The symbolic forms that appear in a code or in
popular customs,’ McLennan said, ‘tell us as certainly of the usages of a people,
as the rings in the transverse section of a tree tell of its age’ (1865: 9). According
to Tylor, European earrings for instance could not be understood ‘as a product
of our own times, but as a relic of a ruder mental condition’, which needed to
be compared with the perforated noses from Papua New Guinea, elongated earlobes from East-Africa and mutilated lower lips from Amazonia. Just like Nilsson
turned to European folklore, some of the social evolutionists turned to rituals in
the modern world to understand prehistory. The study of these petrified customs
would later develop into Tylor’s important notion of ‘survivals’ but he gave already
a preliminary outline:
I cannot but think that [such examples] are to be explained as being, to use the
word in no harsh sense, but according to what seems its proper etymology, cases
of superstition, of the “standing over” of old habits into the midst of a new and
changed state of things, of the retention of ancient practices for ceremonial purposes, long after they had been superseded for the commonplace uses of ordinary
life. (1865: 218, original emphases)

Traces of primeval savagery were not only to be found in the horrific practices
of contemporary wilds, but also in the jewellery and earlobes of Victorian young
ladies.

Ethnographic enthusiasm
The first generation of social evolutionists followed the enthusiasm for ethnographic analogy of Nilsson and Wilson, but built further upon it. Once restricted
to clarifying implements and monuments from the Stone Age through similarities with contemporary cases, now ethnographic analogy was used in a variety of
contexts. Lubbock’s search for a common denominator among contemporary savagery, Tylor’s conjectural sequence of developmental growth, and McLennan’s application of it to social and legal contexts, all went beyond the parallels drawn by
Nilsson and Wilson. Despite their immediate differences, they betray a changing
appreciation of the role of ethnography in early Victorian evolutionism.
First of all, there was an avidity to move beyond the technological realm. This
was not just the case with McLennan, but also with Lubbock: his search for a common denominator equally included a comparison of moral and mental capacities
among savages across the world. Now that the three-age system was taken-forgranted and human antiquity had been established, more weighty issues about the
history of human civilization were to be addressed. But as the geological record

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for reconstructing the life of prehistoric savages went ‘no farther than to inform us
what food they ate, what weapons they used, and what was the character of their
ornaments’ (McLennan 1865: 5), external assistance had to be sought.
A second important trait concerned the notion of hierarchy. Nilsson and
Wilson had been treating the evidence of contemporary savagery as homogeneous, but the Victorian social evolutionists organized it by imposing a particular
hierarchy. This can be seen from Lubbock’s comparative table which arranged
societies from least advanced to well advanced and from Tylor’s developmental
sequence organizing ethnographic customs from simple to complex. According to
McLennan, primitive modes of life were to be understood in ‘their classification
as more or less archaic’ (1865: 8). The greater role ascribed to the idea of progress,
made that such hierarchy from simple to complex implied a development from
ancient to modern. This inevitably led to an inquiry into the most primitive form
of humanity currently living. Together with many of his contemporaries Lubbock
posed the question:
Travellers and naturalists have varied a good deal in opinion as to the race of savages
which is entitled to the unenviable reputation of being the lowest in scale of civilisation. Cook, Darwin, Fitzroy, and Wallis were decidedly in favor, if I may so say,
of the Fuegian; Burchell maintained that the Bushmen are the lowest; D’Urville
voted for the Australians and Tasmanians; Dampier thought the Australians “the
miserablest people in the world;” Forster said that the people of Mallicollo “bordered the nearest upon the tribe of monkeys;” Owen inclines to the Andamaners;
others have supported the North American Root-diggers; and one French writer
even insinuates that monkeys are more human than Laplanders. (1865: 445-6)

Lubbock did not speak out in favour of one these savages. Despite his interest in
the lowest of the lowest, he continued with the warning that ‘the present habits of
savage races are not to be regarded as depending directly on those which characterised the first men’ (446).
This is a third point of convergence among the first generation of evolutionists: the refusal to project one society onto another. Many ethnographic analogies
were drawn, but they were almost invariably limited to piecemeal transfers of
specific functions, manners, and customs; wholesale substitutions of a prehistoric
case by an ethnographic society were explicitly avoided. The Inuit in Lubbock’s
work, for instance, were paralleled on some occasions to the Palaeolithic cave inhabitants of the Dordogne, on others to the Mesolithic shell-mound dwellers in
Denmark, and on still others to the Neolithic people of the Swiss lake-side settlements.18 At no point were they projected at a specific stage of human history.
Tylor, too, warned in his conclusion that ‘it does not seem likely that any tribe known
to modern observers should be anything like a fair representative of primary conditions,’
particularly since ‘the present condition of savage tribes is the complex result of not only
a long but an eventful history’ (1865: 369). Lubbock’s reluctance in this matter was also
18 The term ‘Mesolithic’ is of course an anachronism in this context as the concept only emerged by
the late nineteenth century.

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given in by an awareness that savage habits might be ‘arising from external conditions’
(1865: 446). Diffusion, migration and other forms of cultural contact favoured
by Lubbock and Tylor had affected the pristinity of modern savages. It was only
in a later phase of Victorian evolutionism that this awareness of individual history
would make place for the doctrine of independent invention and the practice of
direct projective reasoning.
A fourth point of agreement was in line with Nilsson and Wilson position’s of
valuing similarity as the cornerstone of ethnographic analogy. Lubbock was so sure of
his functional interpretation of Danish skin-scrapers because they were ‘absolutely identical’ with the Inuit specimens. He also believed that the Fuegians, though ‘among the
most miserable specimens of the human race’, were still of especial interest ‘from their
probable similarity to those of the ancient Danish shell-mound builders’ (439). Primitive
savages did not only resemble prehistoric ones, they also resembled each other, regardless of their individual histories. They all belonged to the same natural kind. Tylor and
McLennan were very firm on this. Tylor (1865: 169) wrote: ‘The state of things among
the lower tribes which presents itself to the student, is a substantial similarity in knowledge, arts, and customs running through the whole world.’ Unencumbered by particularist notions like migration and diffusion, McLennan forcefully said:
So far as my inquiries into early social phenomena have extended, I have found
such similarity, so many correspondences, so much sameness in the forms of life
prevailing among the races usually considered distinct, that I have come to regard
the ethnological differences of the several families of mankind as of little or no
weight compared with what they have in common. (1865: 3)

Similarity was so essential that dissimilarity could be disregarded. Moreover,
as monogenists they were already inclined to stress likenesses over differences
(Murphree 1961: 282). Again, as with Nilsson and Wilson, if contemporary savages could be used it was not just because they simply resembled the prehistoric
inhabitants of Europe, but because they were essentially believed to be the same.
Contemporary savagery was an a-temporal category; old meant ‘not old in chronology, but old in structure’.

Degenerationism and classical evolutionism
The heyday of sociocultural evolutionism are popularly depicted as a triumph
of scientific inquiry over religious dogma. All too often it is forgotten that one
of the main impetuses for its theoretical development was provoked by the writings of some Christian-inspired thinkers (cf. Hodgen 1937; Murphree 1961:
278). Richard Whately, archbishop of Dublin, had already in the 1830s and 50s
expressed his doubts as to whether humanity had arisen from savageness. And
George D. Campbell, better known as the Duke of Argyll, commented extensively
Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times. His writings appeared as four articles in the review
Good Works in 1868 but were assembled in Primeval Man: An Examination of some
Recent Speculations (1869). Far from being an archetypical reactionary attitude of
Christian orthodoxy to the new scientific creed, this book—and too a lesser extent

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Whately’s essays—challenged some of the basic assumptions social evolutionists
took for granted (Gillespie 1977). The hardening of socioevolutionist thought in
the late 1860s into a more radical, unilinear theory of human progress through independent invention was primarily the result of a consorted reaction to the Duke
of Argyll’s critique.

Degenerationist doubts
In a range of publications the Irish archbishop Richard Whately objected to the
idea that humanity had arisen from savageness (Grayson 1983: 217-8). Since the
Scripture spoke of a primeval golden age in paradise, early humanity could by no
means have been miserable. According to Whately, contemporary savages were
therefore examples of post-Adamite degeneration rather than still living primeval
relics. He did not deny that societal progress could take place, but if this happened, it was the result of divine revelation. This had been the faith of Western
civilization: after the Fall, Adam’s descendants had slowly arisen thanks to God’s
benevolent interventions. Since savages were too immoral, no example would be
found of a savage race that had civilized itself without external assistance. Progress
was induced from the outside, either by contact with superior neighbouring societies or by divine intervention. In any case, savages could not pull themselves out
of the morass of their inferiority.
Many of Whately’s ideas reappeared in Argyll’s work—the Christian inspiration, the concept of a primeval perfection, the idea of degeneration amongst contemporary savages—though there were important differences as well. The Duke
of Argyll was no religious dogmatist. Despite the numerous quotes from the Bible
and Augustine which testify to his personal religious convictions, he held that he
reached his degenerationist conclusions on strictly scientific grounds, even if they
eventually squared nicely with the account of the Adamite Fall. He also ‘set little
value on the argument of Whately, that as regards the mechanical arts Man can
never have risen “unaided” ’ (Argyll 1869: 198). Instead of a permanent divine
revelation, he thought that after the initial endowment of a body and a mind,
man basically took care of his own progress. Whately took the Scripture as a literal source of authority for reconstructing humanity’s past; Argyll developed a
Christian-inspired, critical inquiry of man’s origins. Welcoming the nascent field
of prehistory, he said that ‘it is not open to dispute that the early condition of
Mankind is accessible to research’ (24). He dissected available theories into their
component parts, analysed them, and rejected or accepted them. His careful argumentation and the crystal-clear structure of his critiques show how he mastered
‘the art of scientific controversy’ (Gillespie 1977) much more serenely than many
of his contemporaries.
If the Duke of Argyll disagreed with Whateley, he ‘set still less value on the arguments of Sir J. Lubbock’ (199). Primeval Man was first and foremost a lengthy critique
on Pre-Historic Times: Lubbock is literally on the first and last pages of the work and the
entire critique is directed at him. Nevertheless, Lubbock’s book was placed in its broader
scientific context and the three substantial chapters of Argyll’s essay each dealt with the
three major debates of the time: the first one was on ‘the origin of man’ which entailed a

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critique of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature (1863);
the second dealt with ‘the antiquity of man’, that is, Lyell’s Geological Evidences (1863);
and the final one with ‘man’s primitive condition’, or Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times
(1865). As to the first two questions, Argyll’s opinion can be rapidly summarized: he did
not support a simian descent of humanity (contra Huxley) but could very easily accept a
high antiquity of man (pro Lyell). He saw ‘a gulf practically immeasurable’ between man
and the other creatures and believed humanity should be accorded a separate class (1869:
74-5). On the other hand, he knew of ‘no one moral or religious truth which depends
on a short estimate of Man’s antiquity’ (74, 127). Geological age estimates were reconcilable with biblical chronology because ‘thousands of years are as less than seconds in the
Creative days’ (125).19
Argyll vehemently disagreed with Lubbock’s conclusions that civilization had
emerged from savageness and that present-day savages echoed such ancestral condition. Argyll’s critiques against this ‘Savage-theory’ can be grouped into four
lines of dissent. Firstly, whereas Argyll acknowledged the technological inferiority of most prehistoric and present savages, he did not proceed to see this as an
indication of moral or mental inferiority. Those who were ‘ignorant of the industrial arts’ were not necessarily ‘ignorant of duty or ignorant of God’ (132, 133).
Lubbock had always assumed that the degree of technological mastery was a barometer of overall degree of development. Argyll questioned this since he saw no
causal correlation between the two.
Secondly, it remained to be seen whether primitive technology was really inferior. According to Argyll, there was ‘quite as much ingenuity and skill in the manufacture of a knife of flint, as in the manufacture of a knife of iron’ (1869: 150).
The most momentous discoveries in human civilization like the use of fire and
cereal cultivation had occurred in the remote human past. Since ‘the noblest discoveries made by Man were made by him in primeval times,’ he reasoned, ‘Faraday
and Wheatstone are but the inventors of ingenious toys’ (154). Argyll did not only
undermine the vertical relation of causality, he also denied the horizontal relation
of similarity: prehistoric technology was no match for primitive technology.
Thirdly, contemporary savages were too wretched to be representative. Argyll
opined that the lower races of today were living in a condition quite unlike the
one which characterized our progenitors. He saw savages as ‘outcasts of the human family’ (173) who had been driven out of their original territories into inhospitable environments on the fringes of the earth. Since ‘the lowest and rudest
tribes in the population of the globe have been found at the farthest extremities
of its great Continents’ (162-3), the ‘uttermost ends of the world’ (Gamble 1992)
had special importance for Argyll. Regarding the Eskimo, it was ‘hardly possible
to conceive a life so wretched’ (164), while the Fuegians were ‘the most degraded
among the races of mankind’ (167). Primitive as they were, they still had ‘all the
perfect attributes of humanity, which can be and are developed, the moment they
19 The crux of Argyll’s argument came from recently discovered pharaonic wall-paintings in Egypt
which showed that racial differences between negroids and Caucasians dated back to at least the third
millennium B.C. These forced him to give up one of the following biblical truths: either there were different
species of man and there was no need to revise the short chronology, or there was only one species of man but
then one needed more time to explain such old racial differences. Argyll chose the second option.

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are placed under favourable conditions’ (172). Argyll denied that these were good
sources for understanding early human history. ‘Is it not absurd,’ he asked rhetorically (173-4), ‘to argue that the condition of these outcasts of the human family
can be assumed as representing the aboriginal condition of Man?’
What the Eskimos and Fuegians showed, above all, was that humanity could decay.
So, fourthly, the Duke of Argyll reasoned from the ‘indisputable fact that Man is capable
of Degradation’ (155). Close to the protestant notion of human sinfulness, he believed
that human corruption, i.e. man’s constant tendency to do what ‘he ought not to do’,
was ‘as much a fact in the natural history of Man as that he is a Biped without feathers’
(188-9). Where Lubbock saw progress, Argyll found degeneration. The former saw devilworship as a positive step in the growth of religious sentiments, the latter regarded such
horrible practice as ‘not in favour of the doctrine of a gradual rise, but, on the contrary, of
continuous corruption and decline’ (190). This was a central, if poorly defended, tenet of
Argyll’s misanthropic worldview.20 The clash between evolutionists and degenerationists
was one between incommensurable views of human nature, resting more on conviction
than argumentation. Lubbock had optimistically concluded that future generations ‘will
better appreciate the beautiful world in which we live, avoid much of that suffering to
which we are subject, enjoy many blessings of which we are not yet worthy, and escape
many of those temptations which we deplore’ (1865: 492). Argyll’s conclusion said ‘that
even in his most civilized condition, [Man] is capable of degradation, that his Knowledge
may decay, and that his Religion may be lost’ (200).
The historian of science Gillespie (1977) has argued that contemporary critics reacted in three different ways to Argyll: either one took the theory seriously
enough to engage with it, or one rejected it as a scientific theory misled by religious prejudice, or one dismissed it as religious dogmatism altogether. He classified Lubbock and Tylor in the second group. Indeed, they regarded Argyll’s ideas
as a scientific theory resulting from religious bigotry but they nonetheless spent
very many pages refuting it. The degenerationist challenge gave them a common
enemy and contributed to the fortification of evolutionist thought around 1870.
Stocking (1987: 149) rightly says that ‘in Whately and Argyll, the degenerationist assumptions of biblical anthropology surfaced to become, perhaps for the last
time in the realm of serious scientific discourse, central issues of debate.’ For the
last time, but still central.

A second round
The three authors which published a monograph in 1865, each wrote another text
about five years later. McLennan’s ‘The early history of man’ (1869), only 33 pages
long, offered ‘perhaps the best single summary view of sociocultural evolutionism
as it emerged in the mid-1860s’ (Stocking 1987: 169). Lubbock’s The Origin of
20 Argyll offered a curious ‘argument from implements’ to criticize the idea of progress. Even if the
use of stone had everywhere preceded that of other metals, it remained clear that ‘the same Age
which was an Age of Stone in one part of the world was an Age of Metal in another’ (183). Curious,
because none of the sociocultural evolutionists had argued that the whole world had gone through
Thomsen’s ages at the same time. On the contrary, this unevenness of development was the crux of
the comparative method.

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Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man (1870) focused no longer on prehistoric archaeology but exclusively on what the subtitle called the ‘mental and
social condition of savages’. And Tylor’s two-volume Primitive Culture (1871) offered a long defence of socio-evolutionist methodology and the study of survivals.
It is well worth seeing how they reacted upon Argyll’s critique, how their thought
evolved and what place they allotted to the use of ethnographic analogy.
All of them engaged with the issue of degenerationism. In 1865 McLennan
simply took ‘the continuity and uniform character of human progress’ (1865: 7)
for granted; four years later he spent half his article questioning ‘whether men
were originally savage or civilized’ (1869: 525). Tylor’s work contained an extended discussion on what he called ‘the degradation-theory’ (I, 32-69) and Lubbock’s
monograph was one long reaction against it, including two lengthy appendices
against Whately and Argyll. The evolutionists all attacked degenerationism by
stressing the ubiquity of progressive development. McLennan studied marriage,
technology, language and religion in order to show that ‘in each and all of these
there has been development’ (1869: 526). These facts ‘which the Duke of Argyll
has so lightly put aside in his case against Sir John Lubbock’ led to the conclusion that ‘the degradation hypothesis cannot be seriously considered’ (533). Tylor
turned to prehistoric archaeology, ‘the master-key to the investigation of man’s
primæval condition’ (1871: I, 58), which showed an indisputable line of cultural
progress (I, 62). He concluded that ‘on the whole, progress has far prevailed over
relapse’ (I, 32).
Lubbock contended with each of Argyll’s critiques. He entirely demurred with the
remark that there was no causal link between technological skills and moral or mental
virtues: ‘There is, I think, a very intimate connection between knowledge and civilisation. Knowledge and barbarism cannot coexist—knowledge and civilisation are inseparable’ (1870: 482). He also rebutted the idea that contemporary savages were outcasts
driven to the earth’s extremes, because until recently most of the globe had been peopled
by primitive races. Rather than being expelled from a prodigious heartland, people migrated only ‘by peaceful, not hostile force; by prosperity, not by misfortune’ (485).21 The
peripheral ‘Esquimaux’ were not at all wretched compared to the more central natives of
Brazil. On top of that, Lubbock questioned whether all humans were capable of corruption and losing their religion: ‘There is, so far as I know, no evidence on record which
would justify such an opinion, and, as far as my private experience goes, I at least have
met with no such tendency’ (492). He could outline a progressive sequence of religious
attitudes and believed it was ‘a fair argument in opposition to the view that savages are
degenerate descendants of civilised ancestors’ (495). Why then adopt Argyll’s ‘melancholy conclusion’ (507)?

A new theme
The example of religious development testified to two changes which took place
between the first and the second round of social evolutionism: the increased stress
on progress and the greater attention for religion. In 1865 Lubbock spent only
21 This view is well in line with his earlier idea that migration was a sign of civilization.

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six pages to religion; in 1870 three chapters were devoted to it, claiming around
200 pages of the book’s 500. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) had no less than
seven substantial chapters (out of thirteen) dealing with primitive religion and
animism. Why did the interest in material culture shift to the topic of spirituality?
Replying to Christian-inspired thinkers, the evolutionists showed that religion itself was not the result of divine revelation but a historical development of human
civilization. God no longer modelled human progress, but human progress modelled God. Tylor vehemently attacked religious dogmatism in the study of man.
According to him, the most extreme partisans of Anglican scholars, and especially
archbishop Whately, represented:
[...] a system so hateful to the man of science for its suppression of knowledge, and
for that usurpation of intellectual authority by a sacerdotal caste which has at last
reached its climax, now that an aged bishop can judge, by infallible inspiration,
the results of researches whose evidence and methods are alike beyond his knowledge and his mental grasp. On the other hand, intellect, here trampled under the
foot of dogma, takes full revenge elsewhere, even within the domain of religion,
in those theological districts where reason takes more and more the command over
hereditary belief, like a mayor of the palace superseding a nominal king. (1871:
II, 450)

The sudden ethnographic interest for religion was a ‘full revenge’. The degenerationists
had subjected evolution to religion (Whately by invoking divine intervention, Argyll
by invoking human fallibility), now the evolutionists subjected religion to evolution.
Ethnography of religion, Tylor argued, appeared ‘to countenance the theory of evolution in its highest and widest sense’ (II, 452).22 The interest for primitive religion would
eventually dominate Victorian sociocultural anthropology during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century and beyond.

A new theory
Degenerationism also gave rise to a more rigid definition of societal progress. More than
a frequent phenomenon, it was now seen as a nomothetic principle: ‘there was a law of
progress in the evolution of forms of domestic grouping, which may be enunciated as a
law of human progress’ (McLennan 1869: 528). A belief in progress was not new, but
the idea that it occurred through stages was increasingly stressed.23 Tylor, for instance, said
that the ‘various grades may be regarded as stages of development of evolution’ (1871: I,
1). Progress was also increasingly understood as a global, unilinear process. McLennan
could produce ‘numerous examples of all the stages [...] occurring among the most diverse races of man’ (1869: 527). For Tylor (1871: I, 37) the advance of culture was regarded ‘as taking place along one general line’. He boldly stated:

22 Lubbock and Tylor were far from being atheists, they only refused to base scientific inquiry on
Christian doctrine. They looked for what Tylor called an ‘an enlightened Christianity’ (1871: I, 23).
23 This gradualist vision of progress obviously echoed the Enlightenment theories of human history.

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The educated world of Europe and America practically settles a standard by simply placing its own nations at one end of the social series and savage tribes at the
other, arranging the rest of mankind between these limits according as they correspond more closely to savage or to cultured life. (1871: I, 26).

Unilinear progress was so much taken for granted that ‘few would dispute that
the following races are arranged rightly in order of culture:—Australian, Tahitian,
Aztec, Chinese, Italian’ (Tylor 1871: I, 27).
Lubbock and Tylor, once favouring theories of migration and diffusion, now
advocated the doctrine of independent invention. Lubbock held that ‘several races
have independently raised themselves’ and that new ideas ‘arise naturally in very
distinct nations as they arrive at a similar stage of process’ (1870: 462, 479). Tylor
took a similar turn. According to him, the observed similarity between different
races of the earth had now to be ascribed ‘to the uniform action of uniform causes’
(1871: I, 1). This shift from historical connection to independent invention was
also noted by no one less than Franz Boas (1896: 270): ‘While formerly identities or similarities of culture were considered incontrovertible proof of historical
connection, or even of common origin, the new [evolutionist] school declines to
consider them as such, but interprets them as results of the uniform working of
the human mind.’
Progress was lawlike and unilinear, it occurred through discrete sociocultural
stages, and it was reached over the globe by independent invention: this emblematic version of social evolutionism emerged in the context of degenerationist
polemics. As a result, the image of the savages themselves changed: though their
lifestyle was still seen as ‘very abhorrent’, they nonetheless possessed the germs for
autonomous advance so that they ‘do not act without reason, any more than we
do’ (Lubbock 1870: v, 21).

A favourite method
This view of progress could not leave the use of ethnographic analogy unaffected. The
method of drawing developmental sequences by ethnographic sampling was now valued
as the most promising application, especially because the resultant conjectural line could
be corroborated with evidence from modern survivals—a point stressed by both Tylor
and McLennan.24 Tylor gave the clearest methodological exposé. Since the aim was to

24 If the use of ethnographic analogy was fortified, so was Tylor’s doctrine of survivals. More fiercely
than before, Primitive Culture defended the value of studying ritualized and symbolical behaviours
in modern civilization as relics of what were once actual practices. In an excellent, if somewhat
presentist study in ‘the history of scientific method’, Margaret Hodgen argued already in 1937
that Tylor’s more explicit defence of the doctrine of survivals emerged at a time he was ‘in need of
an argument to defeat degenerationism’ (1937: 50). If civilization was the result of a slow, gradual
progress from a state of savagery, ultimate proof of this lowly origin had to be sought in civilization
itself. This is what the study of survivals came down to. Hodgen’s is one of the few studies which
stresses the importance of degenerationism in the development of classical evolutionism.

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‘work out as systematically as possible a scheme of evolution’ (1871: I, 20), one had to
draw a single line of assumed development and fill it with well-chosen ethnographic and
prehistoric instances.25 Tylor said:
By comparing the various stages of civilization among races known to history,
with the aid of archæological inference from the remains of pre-historic tribes,
it seems possible to judge in a rough way of an early general condition of man,
which from our point of view is to be regarded as a primitive condition. [...] This
hypothetical primitive condition corresponds in a considerable degree to that of
modern savage tribes [...] in spite of their difference and distance. (1871: I, 21)

Echoing McLennan’s creed that old meant ‘old in structure, not in chronology’,
Tylor confidently spoke:
Little respect need be had in such comparisons for date in history or for place on
the map; the ancient Swiss lake-dweller may be set beside the mediæval Aztec, and
the Ojibwa of North America beside the Zulu of South Africa. (1871: I, 6)

That such ethnographic sampling entailed circular reasoning was apparently not noted
(Nisbet 1969: 204; Mandelbaum 1971: 106; Fabian 1983).26
McLennan endorsed this method. His stage-like vision of the past gave rise
to a concentric concept of cultural geography. In a major intellectual and industrial centre like London, there were still ‘night street-prowlers [...] nearly as low
in their habits as the jackals of Calcutta’ (542). Beyond the city, the remote areas
of the British countryside presented traces of backwardness: ‘In Devonshire and
Cornwall, at one extreme, and in the Highlands and the Hebrides, at the other,
we discover remains of pre-Christian customs and superstitions, as well as modes
of life of striking rudeness’ (543). This was repeated on a global scale: the uttermost ends of the earth represented the lowest form of primitiveness—not because
savages were driven there by superior races but because they ‘have been situated
where they now are since the dawn of history’ (545). Civilization was like a stone
thrown in the Thames at London; from this epicentre smaller waves reached the
shores of Cornwall and the Hebrides while the last ripples touched the coasts of
Tierra del Fuego and Tasmania. Differential stages of progress could thus be found
across the globe.
Even Lubbock moderated his quest for a common denominator in favour of
drawing evolutionist sequences from simple to complex. ‘A comparison of savage
tribes belonging to different families of the human race’ enabled to arrange evidence in preestablished, conjectural sequences from low to high, from savage to
civilized, from early to late, from past to present (1870: 2-3).

25 Tylor’s later introduction to anthropology (1881) entirely rested on this simple principle of filling
the gaps of preestablished sequences with prehistoric and ethnographic evidence.
26 Nisbet (1969: 204) even said that ‘one would not wish to count up the elements of the self-fulfilling,
the self-sealing, and the purely circular in this whole mode of analysis.’ He called the comparative
method ‘one of the outstanding examples in all social thought of circular reasoning’ (1969: 190).

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Three important changes can be noted in comparison with early evolutionism. The first one was that ethnographic analogy dealt no longer with technology.
Instead of skinscrapers and fire-making, Lubbock and Tylor now worked on laws,
morals, social customs, language, and religion. Prehistoric archaeology was no
longer important once the antiquity of man and the reality of progress had been
demonstrated; but the method of ethnographic analogy could be transferred to
other realms. A second change concerned the gradual decline of piecemeal analogy. Lubbock still warned against projection: ‘It must not be supposed, however,
that the condition of man is correctly represented by even the lowest of existing
races’ (1870: 2). But Tylor came close to equalling certain cultures with stages of
a unilinear sequence:
The Englishman, admitting that he does not climb trees like the wild Australian,
nor track game like the savage of the Brazilian forest, nor compete with the ancient Etruscan and the modern Chinese in delicacy of goldsmith’s work and ivory
carving, nor reach the classic Greek level of oratory and sculpture, may yet claim
for himself a general condition above any of these races. (1871: I, 28)

The third change entailed that similarity was even more important as an analogical criterion than before. Argyll had argued that present-day savages and prehistoric people were
quite distinct; the evolutionists riposted by emphasizing the resemblances. It was for that
reason that Tylor could place the Aztec next to the Swiss lake-dweller. Because ‘existing
savages are not the descendants of civilised ancestors’ and because ‘the primitive condition of man was one of utter barbarism’ (Lubbock 1870: 462), it was no more reasonable
than to argue that ‘the savage state in some measure represents an early condition
of mankind’ (Tylor 1871: I, 32). The analogies formulated after the degenerationist
critique thus dealt with broader themes, were inclined to projection, and were strictly
based on similarity.

Morgan’s scheme
The epitome of classical evolutionism is without doubt Morgan’s Ancient Society
(1877). Building upon the three great previous debates, it refined the ‘extremely
useful’ three-age system (8), accepted ‘the great antiquity of mankind’ (v), and
named degenerationism ‘no longer tenable’ (8). Morgan could do away with it in
two sentences:
It came in as a corollary from the Mosaic cosmogony, and was acquiesced in from
a supposed necessity which no longer exists. As a theory, it is not only incapable of
explaining the existence of savages, but it is without support in the facts of human
experience. (1877: 8)

Now, the road lay open free for theoretical systematization. On the basis of an
economic criterion, Morgan developed his well-known, sevenfold scheme from
savagery (lower, middle, upper), over barbarism (lower, middle, upper) to civilization. It pivoted around the ‘grandly impressive’ notion of ‘a natural as well as
necessary sequence of progress’ (553, 3)—process, of course, being understood

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as gradualist, unilinear, and independently arrived at. As well as parallel, Morgan
added, since technological and economic developments were flanked by social,
political and legal improvement. Probably also by religious growth, but this was so
‘grotesque and to some extent unintelligible’ that ‘it may never receive a perfectly
satisfactory explanation’ (6, 5). All in all, the classification through the criterion of
subsistence replaced the strictly technological yardstick of Lubbock and Tylor. He
thus came in close touch with the schemes proposed by Nilsson and the Scottish
Enlightenment.
In terms of ethnographic analogy, Morgan sought ‘the best exemplification of
each status’ (16) and found that ‘with the exception of the strictly primitive period, the several stages of this progress are tolerably well preserved’ (7). He thus correlated his evolutionist stages with ‘the principal tribes of mankind [...] according
to the degree of their relative progress’ (10). Australia and Polynesia were ‘in savagery, pure and simple’, Africa was ‘an ethnical chaos of savagery and barbarism’,
while the Indians of America ‘exemplified the condition of mankind in three successive ethnical periods’ (16). Like Wilson and Lafitau, the American Morgan
believed that ‘the history and experience of the American Indian tribes represent,
more or less nearly, the history and experience of our own remote ancestors when
in corresponding conditions’ (vii). He concluded the survey as follows:
Commencing, then, with the Australians and Polynesians, following with the
American Indian tribes, and concluding with the Roman and Grecian, who
afford the highest exemplification respectively of the six great stages of human
progress, the sum of their united experiences may be supposed fairly to represent
that of the human family from the Middle Status of savagery to the end of ancient
civilization. Consequently, the Aryan nations [i.e. the Indo-Europeans] will find
the type of the condition of their remote ancestors, when in savagery, in that of
the Australians and Polynesians; when in the Lower Status of barbarism in that
of the partially Village Indians of America; and when in the Middle Status in
that of the Village Indians, with which their own experience in the Upper Status
directly connects. (17)

Morgan’s use of the comparative method was the extreme consequence of what
Tylor had embarked upon. He unhesitatingly equated tribes with stages. Instead
of using curious habits of fire-making, specific myths, or some enigmatic tools in
a piecemeal fashion, now entire tribes were holistically projected onto a unilinear
chain of progress. As with McLennan and Tylor, this implied a disregard for chronology: ‘the condition of each [tribe] is the material fact, the time being immaterial’ (13, original emphases).

A zenith of similarity
Around 1870, a version of social evolutionism developed which became known as
the textbook version of Victorian anthropology. The comparative method reached
its zenith and similarity formed its raison d’être. Morgan levelled the differences between present and prehistoric primitives and Tylor was most explicit about
this ‘similarity and consistency of phenomena’ which ‘the character and habit of

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mankind at once display’: ‘this similarity and consistency may no doubt be traced,
and they may be studied with especial fitness in comparing races near the same
grade of civilization’ (1871: I, 6). He even went back to Samuel Johnson:
As Dr. Johnson contemptuously said when he had read about Patagonians and
South Seas Islanders in Hawkesworth’s Voyages, “one set of savages is like another.”
How true a generalization this really is, any Ethnological Museum may show.
(1871: I, 6)

The tools and customs of savages repeated themselves with ‘wonderful uniformity’
and even when it came to comparing ‘barbarous hordes with civilized nations’,
[...] the consideration thrusts itself upon our minds, how far item after item of
the life of the lower races passes into analogous proceedings of the higher, in forms
not too far changed to be recognized, and sometimes hardly changed at all. (Tylor
1871: I, 6-7)

Indeed, to the evolutionists, ‘one set of savages was like another’.27 The ideas on cultural
hierarchy and societal progress were combined into a practice of substituting one for
another. What once had been a procedure for explaining oil lamps and skinscrapers was
now a matter of projecting on the basis of assumed identity.
This trust in similarity predictably resulted in a neglect of the differences between distinct forms of savageness. McLennan wrote: ‘Numerous and striking
as the differences are by which the types are distinguished, [...] the various races
have so much in common that their differences may be disregarded’ (1869: 545).
Regularity had become more important than patterning variation. In Pre-Historic
Times, Lubbock still emphasized that ‘the differences observable in savage tribes
are even more remarkable than the similarities’ (1865: 455); but in The Origin of
Civilisation, he believed that progress followed ‘a very similar course even in the
27 A similar climate of opinion prevailed amongst physical anthropologists who sought to establish as much
similarities between prehistoric and primitive races. When studying contemporary equivalents for the
Neanderthal skull, Huxley (1863: 155) had to force the amount of resemblance: ‘A small additional amount
of flattening and lengthening, with a corresponding increase of the supraciliary ridge, would convert the
Australian brain case into a form identical with that of the aberrant fossil.’ And the Upper Palaeolithic skeletons discovered in the last quarter of the century at French sites like Chancelade and Grimaldi were likened
to the Eskimo and negroid race respectively. Even if physical anthropology and human palaeontology made
little direct impact on the sociocultural evolutionists, we see how in the study of anatomy, like in the study of
behaviour, similarity between present and past races was eagerly sought and found. Indeed, the very notion of
‘race’ was central to all these disciplines and referred to a complex conglomerate of anatomical, cultural and
technological signifiers.

It would go too far to discuss the history of the nineteenth-century race concept (though I have
embarked upon this theme elsewhere (Van Reybrouck 1998c)). Suffice it to say that for the sociocultural evolutionists it was a common but rarely defined notion. As with all such popular terms (like
‘environment’ today), its meaning was a semantic cluster, which in this case entailed technological,
anatomical, linguistic, ethnic and cultural connotations. It was only in the first decades of the
twentieth century that ‘race’ was reduced by many anthropologists to a strictly biological criterion,
though this did not impede the development of a new forms of racial thinking which reached its sad
apex in the 1930s and 40s. In the framework of the New Evolutionary Synthesis ‘race’ started to be
studied insofar it could be considered as equivalent to a biological ‘population’; in the second half of
the twentieth century the concept has been gradually abandoned.

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most distinct races of man’ (1870: 3). Tylor, too, found ‘such regularity in the
composition of societies of men, that we can drop individual differences out of
sight’:
[...] just as, when looking down upon an army from a hill, we forget the individual soldier, whom, in fact, we can scarce distinguish in the mass, while we
see each regiment as an organized body, spreading or concentrating, moving in
advance or in retreat. (1871: I, 11)

Similarity was stressed at the expense of equally obvious difference as part of the
anti-degenerationist reaction. If similarity had been the taken-for-granted bottom-line of previous ethnographic analogies, now it was the explicitly acknowledged cornerstone of the projections from present source to past target. As always,
it was Morgan who gave the tenet its most candid defence:
So essentially identical are the arts institutions and mode of life in the same status
upon all the continents, that the archaic form of the principal domestic institutions of the Greeks and Romans must even now be sought in the corresponding
institutions of the American aborigines. (1877: 17)

Contemporary savages were, in fact, contemporary ancestors.

Evolutionist fragmentation
In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, sociocultural evolutionism increasingly turned away from the study of material culture and focused on the
development of social institutions and religious ideas. While Tylor increasingly
sought to correlate the lowest stage of savagery with the Tasmanians, such a comparative reasoning was shunned by other evolutionists like Spencer and Frazer and
was criticized by Westermarck and Boas. Prehistoric archaeology, once the ‘masterkey’ for proving sociocultural progress, was now no longer needed. Anthropology
and archaeology grew increasingly independent from each other.

Archaeology and anthropology diverge
Anthropology’s growing independence is undeniable in the end of the century’s
two greatest evolutionist achievements: Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology
(1876-1896) and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890). Their cyclopic proportions notwithstanding (Spencer’s book appeared in three tomes, Frazer’s original two volumes were expanded to twelve by 1914), both books differed profoundly in theme. The Principles offered a grandiose panopticon of sociocultural
growth in political, ecclesiastical and industrial institutions; The Golden Bough
zoomed in on the ritual killing of the priest in primitive religion. Nonetheless, the
role of prehistory in both was minimal. As a preparation for the redaction of his
Principles of Sociology, Spencer (and his assistants) systematically assembled masses
of ethnographic evidence into a series of eight folios entitled Descriptive Sociology.
Numerous societies were classified into cyclopean tables and indexes, but pre-

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historic materials were conspicuously absent. There were no parallels between
Europe’s prehistoric past and the ‘types of Lowest Races, Negritto Races, and
Malayo-Polynesian races’ (Spencer 1874). Spencer only fell back upon the comparative method ‘to classify the types of structure and to establish their sequences’ (Andreski 1969: xviii). Rather than prehistoric reconstruction, his work was
an attempt at ‘evolutionary typology’ (Andreski 1969: xviii; cf. Carneiro 1967).
Frazer, on the other hand, was directly indebted to Tylor’s ethnography of religion. Accepting that modern religion sprung from primitive antecedents, Frazer
set out to undertake a study in ‘comparative religion’. His sources were twofold:
as a classicist he heavily relied on classical mythology; and as a student of Tylor,
he greatly valued survivals: ‘Popular superstitions and customs of the peasantry,’
he wrote, ‘are by far the fullest and most trustworthy evidence we possess as to
the primitive religion of the Aryans’ (1890: viii). His comparative method did not
proceed by ethnographic parallels or wholesale projections from the savage state.
Subsequent expansions of The Golden Bough incorporated a myriad of additional
evidence, but these were strictly ethnographic.
Along with this evolutionist anthropology devoid of archaeology, there developed
an evolutionist archaeology devoid of ethnography. This is well exemplified by the intellectual career of the leading authority on British prehistory after Lubbock: General Pitt
Rivers (Chapman 1985; Bowden 1991). During the 1860s and 70s he endorsed the
merits of the comparative method (Pitt Rivers 1874), but after 1880 his work became
more strictly archaeological. In his early excavations in Ireland he did not hesitate to
draw a parallel with contemporary Eskimos.28 But having inherited the enormous estate
at Cranborne Chase in Wiltshire, he spent several years excavating barrows, dykes and
ditches, but avoided ethnographic reasoning throughout. This does not mean that he
gave up his evolutionist principles, only that the comparative method held no longer
sway. The method even lost ground in Palaeolithic research. James Geikie found an equation between Magdalenians and Eskimos ‘a simple assumption’: even if some formal
similarities can be found, ‘the coincidence is not startling’ (Geikie 1881: 548, 549).
In France, increasingly the centre of Palaeolithic research, there were several attempts
at refining the chronology by scholars like Lartet and De Mortillet. The latter’s enormously influential framework presented a rigid unilinear view of prehistory, but it was
not filled with contemporary ethnographic data (Richard 1992: 25-7). He described ‘le
grand développement […] de l’humanité à l’état sauvage ’ (De Mortillet 1883: 22) without
recourse to extant savages. ‘Paléoethnologie’, as he preferred to call prehistoric archaeology,
was despite its term devoid of ethnology.

28 Ethnography and prehistory were intimately intertwined in his thinking at this stage of his life. He purchased
great amounts of ethnographic artefacts from travellers and organized these according to the principle of
continuity of typical form. Just like Tylor arranged the habits of fire-making and forms of religion along a
developmental line, Pitt Rivers ordered boomerangs, spears, shields and the like into continuous chains of
gradual perfection. His principle was that ‘every form marks its own place in sequence by its relative complexity or affinity to other allied forms’ (1874: 12). This clearly comparative approach also surfaced in the museological guidelines he formulated for ethnographic displays (Chapman 1985). Archaeology essentially served
to lengthen and complete the typological sequences he had already established on the basis of ethnography
(Bowden 1991: 55).

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In prehistoric archaeology, the last two decades of the nineteenth century were increasingly devoted to refining the chronological framework. Montelius’ division of later European prehistory made clear that there was not one line of development but an
enormous diversity in time and space. Ethnographic comparison between stages became
therefore quite problematic. Boas noted that thanks to such detailed archaeological studies on ‘the multiplicity of converging and diverging lines’, the grand system of the evolution of culture was ‘losing much of its plausibility’ (1904: 271). The discovery of
Palaeolithic rock art—first attested in Altamira in 1878, later confirmed by the caves
of Font de Gaume and La Mouthe (Groenen 1994: 317-25)—also contributed to the
decline of the comparative method. So unlike anything known from ethnography, it
undermined the long-held assumption of a fundamental similarity between prehistoric
and present savages. In his famous ‘mea culpa of a sceptic’, the French prehistorian Emile
Cartailhac conceded for the authenticity of the cave art and wrote: ‘En vain on fait appel à l’imagination, en vain à toute ethnographie! Les renseignements ont beau venir de loin,
même du Transvaal, de l’Australie, du Nord-Amérique, rien ne peut permettre de soupçonner
pourquoi ces surfaces étaient ornées ainsi’ (Cartailhac 1902).29

Tylor and the Tasmanians
Several archaeologists and anthropologists began to shun comparative reasoning, but
Tylor finally found what he had long been looking for: a living Palaeolithic tribe, or at
least an only recently exterminated one. In 1890, H. Ling Roth published The Aborigines
of Tasmania, a compilation of all available evidence on the Tasmanians from the form of
the skull to the method of making fire. The preface was written by Tylor who called their
extinction ‘a dismal page of our colonial history’ (1890: vii) but was relieved by the ‘absolute completeness’ (v) of the volume. His old despair about the unlikelihood ‘that any
tribe known to modern observers should be anything like a fair representative of primary
conditions’ (1865: 369) was now optimistically refuted with ‘the vestiges of a people so
representative of the rudest type of man’ (1890: vii):
If there have remained anywhere up to modern times men whose condition has
changed little since the early Stone Age, the Tasmanians seem to have been such a
people. They stand before us as a branch of the Negroid race illustrating the condition of man near his lowest known level of culture. (Tylor 1890: v)

In a host of publications between 1890 and 1900, at a time when the comparative
method came under fire, Tylor avidly expanded this Tasmanian projection (Tylor
1890; 1894; 1895; 1899a; 1899b; 1900).
At first Tylor was struck by the similarity between Tasmanian and Palaeolithic
tools (figure 7). A specimen sent to him from the antipodes (Tylor 1895; cf. Murray
1992) affirmed that they were ‘corresponding exactly’ (1890: v) so that the analogy was
justified ‘by the workmanship of their stone implements’ (v). Tylor’s insistence on tools
in the preface of a book which paid little attention to lithic technology, refers to his long29 New studies, like the ones by Spencer and Gillen on the Australian Arunta (1899) and Stow on
Bushmen cave art (1905), would soon receive prehistoric interest from authors like Breuil and Sollas
(cf. infra).

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standing conviction that technical mastery was a barometer of overall progress. Tools
were ‘pointers in the study of civilization’ (1871: I, 62). In a subsequent paper, he therefore embarked upon ‘the study of their culture in other respects’ (Tylor 1894: 149). Arts,
language, religion, morals, social institutions, ‘just as their stone implements belong to
the recognized stone age, though at an especially low level’ (149). Tasmanians were not
degenerated but had been in a condition of ‘normal or healthy savagery’ (149). Tylor’s
culture concept was holistic: since all parts of a society belonged to the same stage, knowing the degree of progress in one realm (technology) was enough to extrapolate it to other
realms. In a given culture, he had once written, ‘evidence as to the condition of any one
of its departments really does authorise, in some measure, an opinion as to its condition
as a whole’ (1869: 11). On the basis of a side-scraper, Tasmanians could literally become
‘living representatives of the early Stone Age’ (148-9). He eventually went so far as to
invoke anatomical evidence on ‘the similarities between the modern Australioid [sic]
skulls and the prehistoric skulls of Neanderthal, Spy, Padbaba, etc.’ (1899a: 199). Tylor
thus saw his initial hypothesis further confirmed. Archaeology, ethnography and physical
anthropology converged to the point that ‘Man of the Lower Stone Age ceases to be a
creature of philosophic inference, but becomes a known reality’ (1899b: ix).
But not everyone was convinced. Henry Balfour, curator of the Pitt Rivers
museum in Oxford, argued that Tylor risked to neglect relevant dissimilarity between the source and the target: ‘It is essential that the great difference between
the environmental conditions—climate, geographical surroundings, etc.—under
which the two races lived, should not be overlooked’ (in Tylor 1900: 260). The
observed similarity on which the analogy rested was also questionable. ‘The most
characteristic tool of the Tasmanians’, i.e. the simple retouched scraper, was by
no means typically Palaeolithic but proved to be ‘the most persistent of all stone
implements’ (260). Knowledge about Tasmanians was after all ‘based largely upon
post-mortem study’ (261). Balfour doubted the relevance of Tasmanian tools, but
others went much further and a new anthropology was emerging by the end of
the nineteenth century.
Critique of evolutionism
‘How can we from ethnographical facts acquire information regarding the early
history of mankind?’ The question was posed by Edward Westermarck in the introduction of his influential History of Human Marriage (1891: 3). Westermarck,
originally working as a lecturer in sociology in Helsinki before he became a professor at the London School of Economics, addressed the problem McLennan had
dealt with: the origin of marriage. Despite ‘the admirable works of Dr. Tylor, Sir
John Lubbock, and Mr. Herbert Spencer’, he felt ‘that the scientific value of the
conclusions drawn from ethnographical facts has not always been adequate to the
labour, thought, and acumen bestowed on them’ (2). He agreed with McLennan
that savage races and symbolic survivals were the main sources to reconstruct early
human history but the wide-ranging difference of opinion was ‘due, not to the
material, but to the manner of treating it’:

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Figure 7. Resemblances in stone tools led Tylor to equate the entire Tasmanian culture with
that of the lowest stage of savagery during the Upper Palaeolithic (Tylor 1894: plate XI)

Nothing has been more fatal to the Science of Society than the habit of inferring,
without sufficient reasons, from the prevalence of a custom or institution among
savage peoples, that this custom, this institution is a relic of a stage of development
that the whole human race once went through. (2)

Westermarck laid bare the circular reasoning which many social evolutionists had
been guilty of. One had to ‘avoid assuming a custom to be primitive, only because,
at the first glance, it appears to be so’ (6).
Was there any alternative that kept the student of society ‘on his guard against rash
conclusions’ (6)? Westermarck believed there was. Rather than projecting from source to
target, attention should be given to the causal patterns within the source. Westermarck:
‘We have first to find out the causes of the social phenomena; then from the prevalence of
the causes, we may infer the prevalence of the phenomena themselves’ (4). He refused to
favour single tribes as representative, but studied the whole range of contemporary savagery and included some evidence on primate behaviour. Finding causes in the present
source was not enough if we were still ‘quite ignorant whether the causes in question
operated or not in the past’ (5). By invoking Lubbock’s notion of universal progress and
Darwin’s theory of a human-animal continuum, Westermarck showed that a uniformitarian assumption was legitimate. Westermarck thus amended traditional evolutionist
methodology by improving the structure of its analogy: immediate similarity was no
longer enough; the causes operating in the source had to be understood; the source side
of the analogy was expanded; and ground for a uniformitarian assumption was established. However, the substantial part of his work was still heavily dependent on the previous evolutionist generation. His narrative of marriage forms among animals and humans

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belonged to the sort of unilinear sequence which Tylor had proposed, the only difference
being that animals were added to it.30 His work is nonetheless indicative of the doubts
that emerged within the evolutionist paradigm.
Franz Boas was much more sceptical. His intellectual background, like Westermarck’s,
laid outside British anthropology: it was fed by German ethnology, geography, physics,
and physical anthropology (Stocking 1974b: 12; cf. Kuper 1988: 125-30; Boas 1938).
Having seen already the comparative method’s excesses (in the work of Bastian) and opposition (in the work of Virchow, Boas’ teacher), Boas developed a profound critique
against it after his move to the Anglo-Saxon scene. Already in one of his earliest paper,
he greatly differed from the evolutionist paradigm (Boas 1888). Looking at the schemes
of progress from savagery to civilization, he simply believed that ‘the cautious scientist
cannot follow those vagaries’ (637). He sought to introduce to ethnology the historical mode of inquiry which had been abandoned by Tylor, McLennan, Lubbock and
Morgan. Time did again matter since ‘the life of a people in all its aspects is a result of its
history’ (632); historical connection became again respectable to explain cross-cultural
similarity; and degeneration was believed to be genuine. His style of arguing was also at
odds with the evolutionist orthodoxy. More abstract than the high prose of Victorian
scholars, his arguments relied less on the enumeration of exemplary cases but proceeded
by analytical precision and terse writing.31
In 1896 the journal Science published Boas’ article ‘The limitations of the comparative method of anthropology’. This landmark in the history of anthropology entailed
an elaborate critique of evolutionism which saw proof of its self-proclaimed unilinear
progress in the world-wide similarity of cultural customs, ideas, and practices.32 Boas
found the ‘grand system of the evolution of society as of very doubtful value’ (276).
Firstly, because it was based on ‘observed homologies and supposed similarities’ (1904:
263). Believing that ‘we are no longer prone to infer from superficial similarities’ (1888:
636), he wanted that ‘before extended comparisons are made, the comparability of the
material must be proved’ (1896: 275). Secondly, he criticized the evolutionists’ selective
empirical sampling. In order to uphold their basic principle, users of the comparative

30 Westermarck’s progressionist model also echoed the ideas set forth by Darwin in the Descent of Man
(1871). In contrast to his earlier work, Darwin adopted a more linear than branching model when
he was dealing with the evolution of humanity. His own position thus became ‘fundamentally at
odds with the argument set out in the Origin of species’ and resulted in a fairly non-Darwinist strand
(Ingold 1986: 30, 47-50; cf. Bowler 1988: 143-5; 1990: 192). It was also only in the Descent that
Darwin first staged the Fuegians as relics of the remote past, an idea which never surfaced in the
account of his travels aboard the Beagle forty years earlier (Bowler 1992). Westermarck’s sequence of
parenthood from invertebrate animals to civilized humans followed this linear form of reasoning.
31 Another aspect where young Boas differed fundamentally from the social evolutionists was in his
ideas on museum layout. Unlike Thomsen, Worsaae, Wilson and Pitt-Rivers who had all defended
a typological and developmentalist system, Boas, again indebted to a German tradition, sought to
arrange ethnographic materials in geographical and tribal terms (Bunzel 1962: 5).
32 Though Boas directed his critique at evolutionists in general, the German anthropologist A. Bastian
was the direct target of his paper. Still more than Tylor or Morgan, Bastian had dogmatically defended world-wide unilinear evolution by independent invention on the basis of cross-cultural
similarities. Bastian’s extremism had a certain autodestructive influence on the further history of
evolutionism, just like Sollas’ extremist reasonings would cast a dark shadow over the comparative
method.

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method were often ‘forcing phenomena into the straitjacket of a theory’ (277). Thirdly,
he denounced the uniformity principle of the evolutionist paradigm:
Anthropological research which compares similar cultural phenomena from various parts of the world, in order to discover the uniform history of their development, makes the assumption that the same ethnological phenomenon has everywhere developed in the same manner. Here lies the flaw in the argument [...] for
no such proof can be given. Even the most cursory review shows that the same
phenomena may develop in a multitude of ways. (273)

How was one to remedy all those deficiencies? Like Westermarck, Boas urged to
study the causes underlying cultural phenomena. To understand a phenomenon
‘we must demand that the causes from which it developed be investigated and
that comparisons be restricted to those phenomena which have been proved to
be effects of the same causes’ (1896: 275). Similarity, i.e. the horizontal relation
of the analogy, was not enough unless the vertical relation of causality was taken
into consideration. This also entailed an awareness of the problem of equifinality,
namely that ‘other causes could possibly lead to the same ideas’ (276; cf. Stocking
1974b: 2). Such an understanding could only be reached by ‘the much ridiculed
historical method’ (277). To Boas, the historical method was far superior to the
comparative method and much closer to the Darwinian principle of branching,
anti-teleological evolution than sociocultural evolutionism (Boas 1888: 633;
Ingold 1986: 30, 65; Bowler 1988: 140).
His anti-evolutionist emphasis notwithstanding, Boas still withheld the old ambition
of finding general laws. Historical particularism was, originally at least, a methodological
device for a larger nomothetic project.33
If anthropology desires to establish the laws governing the growth of culture, it
must not confine itself to comparing the results of the growth alone, but whenever
such is feasible it must compare the processes of growth, and these can be discovered by means of studies of the cultures of small geographical areas. (280)

Rather than glossing together evidence from a world-wide survey, one had to
focus on ‘a well-defined, small geographical territory’ (1896: 277). The time of
the armchair anthropologist was gone, and fieldwork increasingly became a part
of the scientific enterprise. The moment Boas’ paper was published, Baldwin
Spencer and Frank Gillen, motivated by Tylor and Frazer, were undertaking their
seminal fieldwork on the Arunta rituals in Central Australia. Boas himself would
soon start his fieldwork with Kwakiutl and Nootka of the American North-West
coast. Eventually, this type of ‘careful and slow detailed study of local phenomena’ (1896: 277) contributed to a decline in diachronic and nomothetic interests
(Harris 1968: 170; Gosden 1999). Insisting on understanding individual societies
prevented a return to the question on the evolution of culture. Tylor, Lubbock,

33 It was only much later in his career that Boas let go this law-building ambition in favour of a strictly
particularist project (Boas 1920; 1924; cf. Stocking 1974b).

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McLennan and Morgan nearly exclusively focused on similarity, but Boas and his
students increasingly limited themselves to a study of causality in most particular
settings.

The comparative method’s swan-song: Sollas
The comparative method lost ground both in archaeology and anthropology, but there
were still occasions where it could thrive, even more effervescently than before. W.J.
Sollas’ Ancient Hunters (1911), the first general survey in English on Palaeolithic archaeology since Lubbock, was one of these. The book assembled ‘the vast store of facts’
(1911: vii) which had been discovered in geology, archaeology, sociocultural anthropology and physical anthropology.34 Sollas followed the classification of De Mortillet
and it is well known how he flanked the archaeological chapters on the Acheulean, the
Mousterian, the Aurignacian and the Magdalenian with four ethnographic chapters on
the Tasmanians, the Australians, the Bushmen and the Eskimos respectively. The study
of contemporary primitive societies was not ‘a wilful anachronism’ because it afforded
‘an opportunity of interpreting the past by the present—a saving procedure in a subject
where fantasy is only too likely to play a leading part’ (70). In up to forty pages per tribe,
he gave extended descriptions of the material culture, anatomical peculiarities and, if
evidence permitted, social institutions and ritual practices. Just like Morgan illustrated
the stages of his progressionist scheme with an example of a modern tribal society, Sollas
filled the sterile epochs of De Mortillet’s classification with ethnographic cases.
The criterion of similarity provided the underlying rationale for selecting and
ordering parallels. The Tasmanians were adopted because of the ‘curious exactness’
already noted by Tylor between their tools and the ones found in the Dordogne
(88). The Australians were defended as ‘the Mousterians of the Antipodes’ (170)
because of their cranial similarity to Neanderthals—a point which Huxley had
made fifty years earlier. The Bushmen were selected on the basis of their rock
art which recalled ‘in the closest manner the best efforts of Aurignacian times’
(252). And the Eskimos were privileged because ‘the evidence could scarcely be
more definite’ (376) regarding their anatomical and cultural likenesses with the
Magdalenian hunters. The Chancelade skeleton was believed to represent ‘a veritable Eskimo, who lived in southern France during the Magdalenian age’ (376) and
the material culture contained was in perfect accordance:
There is no essential difference between the more primitive Eskimo arrowstraighteners and those of the Magdalenians; the bone arrow-heads are often strikingly similar, and this similarity extends to those used by the Indians [...]; the
bone hairpins of the Magdalenians may be matched among those of the Eskimo,
and the lobate ivory pendants, sometimes heart-shaped, which both races possess,
are almost identical in size and form. [...] Other little pendants of unknown use

34 The time was ripe for syntheses. In the same year, Arthur Keith published Ancient Types of Man but
this was mostly confined to fossil evidence. A few years later Henry Osborn wrote another synthesis
Men of the Old Stone Age (Trinkaus and Shipman 1993: 210).

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among the Eskimo resemble the Magdalenian in every respect, and this is a very
important fact. It is resemblance in trivial detail which impresses us quite as
much, if not more, than resemblance in general design. (368, emphases added)

Even if such vital Eskimo inventions like the kayak and the sledge were absent from the
Magdalenian repertoire, Sollas guessed that such relevant dissimilarity did not weaken
his argument. Superficial similarity, ‘resemblance in trivial detail’, was considered more
definite.35
If this read like an archaeological translation of Morgan’s scheme, it was also
profoundly different. Progressive change was no longer the result of independent, unilinear development: ‘I find little evidence of indigenous evolution,’ Sollas
wrote, ‘but much that suggests the influence of migrating races; if this a heresy it
is at least respectable and is now rapidly gaining adherents’ (vii). Thanks to Boas
in anthropology and Montelius in archaeology, at the turn of the century diffusion and migration re-emerged as explanatory mechanisms. The Tasmanians were
‘the surviving descendants of a primitive race’ (85) which had once been widely
distributed over the old world. The natives of Australia could be seen as ‘the inferior tribes of the Neandertal race [which] were driven by stress of competition
out of Europe, and wandered till they reached the Australian region’ (208). The
Bushmen, deriving from the Aurignacian parent stock, ‘must have traversed the
whole length of Africa before arriving at the Cape’ (301), leaving behind a trace
of rock art manifestations ‘between the Dordogne and the Cape’ (304). And the
Eskimos were Magdalenians who had been pushed into the north at the end of
the ice age when subarctic fauna retreated to Siberia and early agriculture exerted
demographic pressure. Sollas could thus sum up his conclusion:
If the views we have expressed in this and preceding chapters are well founded, it
would appear that the surviving races which represent the vanished Palæolithic
hunters have succeeded one another over Europe in the order of their intelligence:
each has yielded in turn to a more highly developed and more highly gifted form
of man. From what is now the focus of civilisation they have one by one been
expelled and driven to the uttermost parts of the earth: the Mousterians survive in
the remotely related Australians at the Antipodes, the Solutrians are represented
by the Bushmen of the southern extremity, the Magdalenians by the Eskimo on
the frozen margin of the North American continent and as well, perhaps, by the
Red Indians. (382-3)

Sollas is often seen as the epitome of sociocultural evolutionism (cf. Stiles 1977:
89; Wylie 1985: 66), but his diffusionist thinking makes him at the same time
the precursor of the direct-historical method for drawing analogies (Trigger 1989:
155; Bowler 1992). His legacy, as we will see in the next chapter, was therefore
ambiguous. Archaeologists during the first half of the twentieth century rapidly
35 The Solutrian epoch with its impressive flint implements was not illustrated by a present-day society
because ‘no existing tribe is able to obtain quite the same perfection of retouch’ (309). Since no
simile existed, no analogy was drawn either; even in the negation of analogy, similarity was the sole
criterion at stake.

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rejected the excesses of his comparative method—his far-fetched conclusions even
cast a dark shadow on the whole of sociocultural evolutionism to the extent that
even today archaeologists (Hodder 1982a) consider Victorian anthropology as
synonymous to Sollas—yet at the same time, he was still appreciated for his reasoning from historically-connected societies, which was increasingly seen as the
only reliable form of analogy.

Divergence of opinion
After Morgan’s grand scheme of universal progress, a fragmentation occurred in
the study of sociocultural evolution. Archaeology and anthropology became institutionalized (as reflected by the increase of excavations and fieldwork, the emergence of specific journals and museums, the growing number of practitioners, and
the expanding scale of scholarly gatherings) and the initially unified discipline
made room for a more diversified spectrum of opinion.
The attitude towards ethnographic analogy can be clustered in three distinct
groups: a first group was characterized by a decreasing interest for the comparative
method; a second group continued to trust the method and benefited from the
data disclosed by new publications; a third group explicitly criticized the method. Frazer and Spencer belonged to the first group. Still versed in the evolutionist project, they both avoided ethnographic parallels in the style of Morgan. In
archaeology, the work of Pitt Rivers and de Mortillet belonged to this group.
Both were firmly committed to a strict unilinear evolutionism, but refrained from
drawing ethnographic analogies.
Scholars belonging to the second group perpetuated the use of the Morganlike comparative method and incorporated new evidence in the existing framework. This is clearly the case for Tylor who found in Ling Roth’s compilation on
the Tasmanians a confirmation of his earlier views. Sollas walked into Tylor’s footsteps in his enthusiasm for the Tasmanians. Further drawing upon Spencer and
Gillen’s fieldwork in Australia, Stow’s in Africa and Boas’ in North America, he
elaborated the Palaeolithic equation with a native tribe for every age.
Westermarck and Boas represented the third group. They were at pains to
point out the deficiencies and fallacies of the comparative method and suggested
an alternative procedure. Interestingly, both had come to Anglo-Saxon evolutionist anthropology from a continental background in ethnography—Westermarck
from Finland; Boas from Germany. The popularity which the comparative method enjoyed in London anthropological circles had never been so large on the
continent. Despite intellectual differences, both lamented the undue reliance on
similarity. Reasoning from similarity, without weighing its relevance, was bound
to fail. Both, too, suggested that internal causality had to be studied if the ethnographic information was to have any clear value.
At the turn of the century, there was an interesting discrepancy between adherents of the second and third group. Whereas the long-favoured criterion of
similarity was brought to unseen heights of quasi-identity in the arguments of
Tylor and Sollas, people like Westermarck and Boas suggested that this was not
the way to proceed, unless attention be given to causality. The clarity of Sollas’

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argument showed at the same time its simplicity; by optimistically revitalizing
the comparative method to a schematic extreme, some of the weaknesses had become apparent. In the first half of the twentieth century, Boasian particularism
would dovetail nicely with the culture-historical paradigm that arose in prehistoric archaeology.

Conclusion
From Thomsen’s typology to Sollas’ synthesis, the use of ethnographic analogy
played a fundamental role in the nineteenth-century representation of human prehistory. Indeed, ‘prehistory has never existed without ethnography’ (Orme 1973:
490) and many of its basic insights were suggested or extrapolated from contemporary source contexts. Before moving on to see how this legacy was received in
the twentieth-century, it deserves to pay a closer attention to the six strength criteria of the analogical arguments.
Firstly, the number of source contexts evidently increased throughout the nineteenth century. Whereas Wilson and Nilsson had to contend themselves with general reports by travellers and missionaries on North-American Indians and South
Sea Islanders, someone like Sollas could dispose of detailed ethnographies on the
Bushmen, the Central Australians, the Eskimos, and the Tasmanians. In general,
nineteenth-century scholars tried to incorporate as much contemporary evidence
as possible which in principle would have enhanced the quality of the analogy.
However, when it came to drawing specific analogies, the sources were mostly narrowed to the best fitting instance. Thus, Wilson explained his Scottish oil lamps
just with the specimens he had found on the Faroe Islands; Tylor associated the
‘stick-and-groove’ stage of pyrotechnology exclusively with the South Sea Islands;
Morgan correlated each stage of his scheme with only one specific society; Sollas
strictly found a single contemporary race as representative of each Palaeolithic
epoch. Despite the broad ethnographical interests, at the end of the day it came
down to selecting the single entity from the source which correlated best with the
target entity under consideration. Lubbock’s search for a common denominator
was the only attempt to go beyond inferences from a single source entity, but he
did not pursue it further.
With regard to the related criterion of the variety of source contexts, Lubbock, too,
was the one who scored best: his image of the prehistoric savage was based on such varied sources as the ‘wretched’ Tasmanians and the ‘nearly civilized’ Tahitians. The others,
however, by reducing the source analogue to a single well chosen instance, minimized the
variety of source contexts—a point criticized by Westermarck’s alternative. Source variety was further limited by an exclusive attention to human analogues; inspiration from
nonhuman primates was virtually absent (a point which I elaborate in the introduction
of Chapter 4; cf. Stocking 1987: 176-7). Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times had one line on
nonhuman primates, but two hundred pages on modern savages.36 Evidence on
primate behaviour was of course scant, in contrast to the number of ethnographic publi36 ‘So long, indeed, as he was confined to the tropics, he may have found a succession of fruits, and
have lived as the monkeys do now’ (Lubbock 1865: 475-6).

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cations. The study of animal behaviour in the nineteenth century was confined to more
readily observable species like ants, bees, and beavers. Social evolutionists had considerable interests for these: Morgan wrote on the American beaver when turning to anthropology and Lubbock investigated bees and wasps after his work on prehistory (Ingold
1988; Swetlitz 1988; Clark 1998). On top of that, for most sociocultural evolutionists
the question of man’s simian descent was simply not yet at stake. They were more interested in human civilization than in human evolution. Most evolutionists ‘assumed that
even in the most primitive social environment, a human being was still a human being’
(Bowler 1989: 39).
Thirdly, how was the situation for the criterion of similarity? The question
can best be answered by the words of Franz Boas (1904: 267): ‘The evolutionary
method was based essentially on the observation of sameness of cultural traits the
world over.’ Indeed, it is no exaggeration to state that throughout the nineteenth
century the amount of similarity was the only analogical criterion seriously dealt
with. Harris (1968: 171) rightly said that ‘it was upon the similarities that a science of universal history [had] depended.’ Nilsson and Wilson held that prehistoric and present primitives were essentially similar because they both lived in the
Stone Age. Lubbock, Tylor and McLennan reasoned from ethnographic present to
prehistoric past on account of ‘such similarity, so many correspondences, so much
sameness’ (McLennan 1865: 3). Geographically distant was interchangeable with
geologically remote. They buttressed this similarity even further after some opponents had suggested that today’s savages did not resemble the past inhabitants of
Europe; similarity thus became the cornerstone of a fully-developed sociocultural
evolutionism. Morgan, Tylor and Sollas even believed that entire modern societies
were identical to certain stages of the past, the emergent anti-evolutionist criticisms notwithstanding. Despite the changing polemical contexts, formal similarity remained the most important logical foundation of ethnographic reasoning and
its centrality even increased as the century moved on. Goodness of fit determined
the quality of analogy.Nevertheless, the meaning of this similarity was subject to
historical change. For Nilsson and Wilson, the evidence of cross-cultural similarity testified to divine action. For Lubbock and Tylor similarity first revealed the
extent of historical connection, and later the prevalence of independent invention. With Sollas, finally, we fall back in an earlier mode of explanation which
interpreted similarity in terms of migrations.
Fourthly, dissimilarity was a notion which evolutionists felt uncomfortable
with. Believed to be structure-violating, every hint of difference was to be avoided.
McLennan repeatedly said that because the resemblances between savages were so
numerous, the differences could be done away with; Tylor wholeheartedly agreed
with that; and Morgan projected present societies on past ones as if there was no
difference between the two. The denial of difference went hand in hand with their
monogenist convictions, i.e. the belief that all races of the earth represented a single species. Sollas, on the other hand, recognized discrepancies between the source
and target of his analogies (e.g. when the Middle Palaeolithic Australians turned
out to use ground implements of Neolithic type), but systematically minimized
their importance. Neglecting and trivializing, these were two ways to eliminate

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dissimilarity. Another favourite procedure consisted in bracketing certain parameters, in particular time. McLennan, Tylor and Morgan all said that time was not
material, which enabled them to browse through the centuries and the continents
in order to force similarity where it was not found. Boas was the first to direct
the attention again to an awareness of time when he said societies could only be
understood in terms of their own history. Similarity made place for particularism
and drawing analogies became a much more complex affair.
Fifthly, little consideration was given to the notion of relevance. In the absence
of a definite yardstick that could tell which aspects of the source and target were
relevant and which were not, enumerating the points of similarity became the
only remaining procedure. Notions like the psychic unity of humanity, the like
workings of the mind under like conditions, the mechanism of independent invention (or divine revelation in Wilson’s view), and the monogenist conviction all
supported the view that similarities between cultures were due to similar causes,
but a genuine causal understanding, like Westermarck and Boas called for, of
why certain patterns emerged in certain places and why others did not, was never
reached by the sociocultural evolutionists. Tylor could argue that technology was
correlated to other sociocultural realms, but similarity remained formal similarity:
if two entities from the source and the target looked alike in certain respects (regardless of whether it was a stone tool, a ritual or a kinship form), they were alike
in other respects (function, meaning, origin). An explanation for this similarity
was rarely sought so that evolutionist analogies were formal analogies, hardly ever
relational analogies.
Sixthly, how was the weight of the analogical conclusions in relation to the
weight of the premises? Here, a clear change can be noted. In an earlier phase of
the comparative method, the scale was still in balance. Wilson, for instance, could
safely infer the function of his oil lamp with its Faroe analogue; Lubbock could
identify the use of Palaeolithic skinscrapers on account of Inuit specimens; Evans
drew many small-scale parallels between prehistoric and ethnographic objects
(1872; 1881). In the 1860s, both Lubbock and Tylor agreed that no contemporary tribe of savages could be seen as directly representing an ancestral condition;
they thus preferred piecemeal analogies between well chosen cases. This, however,
changed when Morgan started to project entire societies on the steps of his evolutionist ladder. Tylor and Sollas followed in his footsteps. Clearly, the scales turned
out of balance now that complete stages of the prehistoric past were reconstructed
on the small base of observed similarity. Tylor’s Tasmanian analogy, in its initial
form, rested on the very thin line of formal resemblance of one Tasmanian scraper
to its Palaeolithic equivalent (Murray 1992). Sollas’ equations had at their base
often nothing more than a vague resemblance in rock art or skull form’s. Geikie’s
warning that ‘one specimen only seems too slight a foundation to build such a
theory’ (1881: 549) was passed in silence; their conclusions clearly outweighed
the premises. Just like in earlier centuries, the role of ethnographic analogies in
the nineteenth century oscillated between localized problem-solving with high
degrees of inferential confidence and global visualization with lesser degrees of
such confidence.

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Chapter 3

Ethnoarchaeology

The dormancy of ethnographic analogy
In 1911, the same year in which W.J. Sollas published his Ancient Hunters, another book appeared which, despite its mere thirty pages, would change the face
of prehistoric archaeology. It was Gustaf Kossinna’s Die Herkunft der Germanen,
a treaty on the method of prehistoric research illustrated by means of a contentious example. Though the author did not belong to Anglo-Saxon archaeology, his influence on it was substantial, particularly through the work of Childe.
The late-nineteenth-century increase in archaeological excavations had shown
that there were vast variations in the archaeological record from different regions.
Kossinna took this geographical variability as the cardinal point of his thought:
the task of the prehistorian was to delineate cultural provinces (Kulturkreisen) and
to detect the amount of contact between them. His axiom was: ‘Kulturgebiete sind
Volksgebiete’ (1911: 4), regional variation in material culture had to be understood
in ethnic terms. His was an approach which thus identified ‘Töpfer mit Völkern’
(11), pots with people, and which used similarities and differences between cultural provinces as arguments for migration of peoples, diffusion of ideas, or simple
contact. Likewise, the year 1911 witnessed the publication of another important,
if less spectacular, monograph: John Myres’ The Dawn of History. Myres, once
the editor of a Pitt Rivers reader (1906), left the latter’s evolutionist thought far
behind in his own substantial work. His monograph maintained that the roots of
European culture were to be found in Egypt and Mesopotamia from where technology and political ideas had spread. Cultural innovation came about because
wandering societies like the Indo-European or Semitic nomads distributed ideas
from their homeland to other regions. Likewise, Kossinna had argued that the
germs of German civilization had to be sought in the Indo-European expansion
and the diffusion of ideas from one culture circle to another.
Along with Sollas’ mélange of evolutionist and diffusionist thought, these two
books could not have escaped the attention of the careful reader as they revealed
some of the paradigmatic changes that took place in archaeology. The word ‘culture’ started to be used in plural and scholars no longer focused on ‘the evolution
of culture’ but on ‘the history of cultures’ (Meinander 1981). Diffusion and migration replaced independent invention and parallel evolution as the key concepts for
explaining cultural change. The interest in subsequent stages became an interest in
adjacent Kulturkreisen; chronological preoccupations were joined by a geographi-

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cal emphasis; and a new form of illustration, distribution maps, complemented
the older chronological schemes. In the visual language of archaeology, the timeaxis of the evolutionist diachronic scheme became an arrow which indicated wandering societies on the synchronic maps of the diffusionist. This shift from sociocultural evolutionism to cultural-historical archaeology was, of course, already
adumbrated by Montelius’ chronology of prehistoric Europe and Boas’ historical
particularism, but it was in the first decades of the twentieth century that the rupture was to become definite (Trigger 1989: 148-206).
This is most clearly seen in the early work of Myres’ pupil at Oxford, the
Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe. Already the title of his first archaeological monograph, The Dawn of European Civilization (1925), echoed Myres’
The Dawn of History (1911). Childe was no longer interested in ‘the common
substratum’ of humanity as described by Morgan, but focused on ‘a peculiar and
individual manifestation of the human spirit’ in Europe (1925: xiii), thus testifying to the rise of particularism. His next book, The Danube in Prehistory (1929),
dealt with the poorly understood region of Central Europe which was, however,
the crucial passage way along which inventions from the Near East were brought
to Western Europe. It contained Childe’s classical definition of the culture concept as the constant recurrence of pots, implements, ornaments, burial rites and
house forms which was ‘the material expression of what would to-day be called a
“people” ’ (1929: vi). This definition of the archaeological culture was identical to
Kossinna’s. Yet Childe was strongly aware of the potential political abuse of culture-historical archaeology, a danger which the Nazi appropriation of Kossinna’s
work would made painfully clear. For Childe, too, the spatial dimension was more
important than the temporal dimension; he admitted that the culture concept
was ‘not necessarily a chronological concept’ (vii). In the Bronze Age (1930) he
elaborated this culture-historical approach, though more attention was given to
social impact of technological innovations like metallurgy—a theme which would
become the hallmark of his later work. As such, the work of Childe during the
1920s (which further included monographs like The Aryans from 1926 and The
Most Ancient East from 1928) played a crucial role in the raise of culture-historical
archaeology and the dismissal of classical evolutionism.
The consequences of this paradigmatic shift for the use of ethnographic analogy were profound. Sollas could only defend his source analogues by circuitous arguments which were supposed to show that the Tasmanians, Australians, Bushmen
and Eskimos directly descended from their Palaeolithic counterparts. Now that the
emphasis was no longer on universal stages of developmental growth, it became
much more difficult to uphold the idea that one society was a fair representative of
another. If prehistory is conceived of as an intricate web of migrating races which

Of course, Kossinna, Boas, and Montelius were rooted in the continental tradition where social
evolutionism was clearly less popular than in Britain. However, it would be wrong to ascribe the
divergence between them and the Victorian evolutionists strictly to a matter of nationality. This is
clear from the fact that culture-historical archaeology rapidly won territory in British archaeology
during the first decades of the twentieth century. It was first of all the growth of archaeological and
anthropological data which forced a new perspective, and the approach hitherto favoured by several
authors in Germany, France and Scandinavia proved more rewarding.

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replace some and influence others, the only viable form of analogy becomes a
direct-historical approach. Archaeologists in the first quarter of the century believed that ethnography could only shed light on the remote human past if there
was evidence for historical continuity between the source and target analogues.
Since few were prepared to follow Sollas’ outrageous claims, the study of European
prehistory (where urban and industrial revolutions implied a drastic break with
the tribal past) had to be performed without ethnographic input. Kossinna proudly defended his ‘rein auf archäologische Grundlage gestellte Volksforschung’, an ethnic inquiry strictly based on archaeological principles (1911: 2). In America, on
the other hand, the alliance between archaeology and ethnology could remain
intact since it was commonly believed that the native American Indian groups
of the present directly descended from historical tribes. Individuals like Wedel
and Strong could therefore use direct-historical analogies in their study of prehistoric Plains Indians (Willey and Sabloff 1980: 108-9; Charlton 1981: 137-9).
Nevertheless, the sweeping ethnographic parallels of the evolutionist times never
surfaced again but were replaced by minute one-to-one comparisons between prehistoric and present tribes.

Innovations in the Interbellum
Now it would be wrong to believe that this situation continued until the New
Archaeologists of the early 1960s broke the deadlock. Despite the rhetorical writings of these angry young men in North America, the first half of the twentieth
century was far less monolithic than their caricature suggested. Changes took
place, both in theory and methodology. The later phase of the Interbellum was
a period of intense theoretical debate and innovation, especially among British
prehistorians. It is no coincidence that two leading journals in British archaeology originated in that era: Antiquity in 1927 and the Proceedings of the Prehistoric
Society in 1935.
Had traditional culture-historical archaeology been primarily concerned with
filling in the time-space matrix of European prehistory (in America, they spoke
of the ‘ages and areas approach’), this objective was more or less met after a quarter century of research in the field and on museum collections. Indeed, by the
early 1930s a rough outline of where and when the various cultures of prehistoric
Europe had lived could be compiled, even if it still showed some hiatuses. In 1932,
Burkitt and Childe compiled such comprehensive table chart for the Antiquity
readership; it was the first in its kind (Burkitt and Childe 1932). Though it served
as a basis for further refinement, it showed at the same time the outer limits of the
culture-historical approach. This is well illustrated in the very first presidential address delivered by Childe at the Prehistoric Society only three years later, in 1935.
Childe, who had by then become Europe’s leading prehistorian, said that ‘we shall
continue to distinguish cultures and to assign each its proper place in a framework

After the ‘coup’ of Grahame Clark and a number of younger scholars, the somewhat obsolete
Prehistoric Society of East Anglia was transformed into the Prehistoric Society; the Proceedings
becoming their most immediate forum (Smith 1996).

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of absolute chronology’ but contended that this was not enough: ‘It would be an
old-fashioned prehistory that regarded it as its sole function to trace migrations
and to locate the cradles of peoples.’ Instead, once this is done, attention should
be directed at a culture’s ‘changes in economic organization and scientific discoveries’ (Childe 1935: 9-10). Childe, therefore, expanded Thomsen’s typological
three-age system to a functional-economic interpretation: each age was separated
from the previous one by an economic revolution, a fundamental reshuffling of
the forces and relations of production. This terminology betrays Childe’s growing
interest in Marxist archaeology, which was boosted by his 1934 travel through the
USSR, though at this point he was more readily influenced by the functionalist
anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski than by Marxism per se.
Even if not everyone partook in the enthusiasm for the Marxist movement and
Russian archaeology (Grahame Clark, for example, named Soviet archaeology ‘a
department of Bolshevik propaganda’ (1936: 248; cf. Tallgren 1937)), there was
a growing dissatisfaction in Britain with culture-historical archaeology which was
felt to be too sterile, too much concerned with pots instead of people. Instead
of tracing the wanderings of abstract cultures on the basis of stylistic similarities
and differences in ceramic decoration and other forms of ornamentation, some
prehistorians increasingly focused on technological, economic and ecological
themes. Apart from Gordon Childe’s shift from a Kossinna-like culture-historical
approach in the 1920s towards a functionalist archaeology of prehistoric economy and technology in the 1930s (which eventually developed into a full-blown
Marxist archaeology in the 1940s and 50s), individuals like Grahame Clark and
A.M. Tallgren urged to go beyond the ‘cul-de-sac’ of culture-historical archaeology in order to gain ‘an understanding of social systems, of economic and social
history, to the history of religious idea’ (Tallgren 1937: 154). Bolshevik or not,
technology, economy and ecology became the fields of attention for a number of
British scholars who were acquainted with functionalist anthropology or Marxist
social theory.
As a corollary of these broader aims, the thorny issue of ethnographic analogy
was raked up again. In the very first issue of Antiquity, the editor O.G.S. Crawford
(1927: 3) outlined the journal’s policy as follows:
We shall not confine ourselves too rigidly within the conventional limits of archaeology. The past often lives on in the present. We cannot see the men who built
and defended the hill-top settlements of Wessex, but we can learn much from
living peoples who inhabit similar sites to-day in Algeria. From such, and from
traditional accounts of the Maori forts we learn, by comparison, to understand
the dumb language of prehistoric earthworks.

Crawford explicitly referred to the nineteenth-century evolutionists: ‘this is the
old anthropological method of Tylor and Pitt-Rivers and it has too long been
neglected by archaeologists’ (4). The article on Maori hill-forts in the same issue of Antiquity presented a detailed description of these monuments in New
Zealand, preceded by the remark that they were ‘strongly reminiscent of the British

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hill fortress’ (Firth 1927: 67). Yet how archaeologists could use evidence from the
ethnographic present was not spelled out. The case study was not different from
Sollas’ parallel between Inuit houses and Scandinavian tombs.
Gordon Childe gave the issue more serious consideration in his classic Man
Makes Himself (1936). He admitted that ‘contemporary savages have just been
described as living in the Stone Age to-day,’ but added:
That does not justify the assumption that Stone Age men, living in Europe or the
Near East 6000 or 20,000 years ago, observed the same sort of social and ritual
rules, entertained the same beliefs, or organized their family relationships along
the same lines as modern peoples on a comparable level of economic development.
(Childe 1936: 45).

Sollas’ Bushmen, Eskimos or Arunta might have a similar tool technology and
subsistence economy as prehistoric people had, this did not imply that their social
and spiritual life had been arrested. The Arunta, for example, used only very simple utensils but had in the course of time developed extremely complex marriage
and kinship rules. There was no causal link between a society’s technology and its
rituals, beliefs, and institutions. ‘The assumption that any savage tribe to-day is
primitive in the sense that its culture faithfully reflects that of much more ancient
men is gratuitous’, Childe opined (46). Ethnographic analogy could only be used
‘as a mere gloss or commentary on actually observed ancient objects,’ but anything
more was ‘illegitimate’ (46-7). Childe repeated these ideas in his next widelyread book, What Happened in History (1942) where he said that ethnographic
analogies could not ‘disclose with scientific precision’ the content of religious beliefs and social structures of Palaeolithic societies since ‘that is unknowable’ (45).
He remained deeply sceptical about any serious contribution from ethnography
(Trigger 1980: 75, 99).
Grahame Clark, the second key figure in the rise of functionalist archaeology, equally dealt with the problem. In Archaeology and Society (1939), probably
the first book fully devoted to archaeological theory and methodology, he went
back to the work of Nilsson, Lubbock and Pitt-Rivers but was far less enthusiastic
about it than Crawford. ‘The evolutionists made a grave error in treating human
prehistory on the same level as the prehistory of animal species’; comparative ethnography should not be likened to comparative anatomy because ‘modern savages
have a history precisely as long as that of the most civilized peoples’ (1939: 171).
This awareness of the long histories individual cultures had gone through was very
close to Childe’s argument on the Arunta. In Clark’s view, modern peoples could
only be used ‘with extreme caution and within well-defined limits, since one is
otherwise in danger of assuming what one is after all trying to discover’ (172),
thus laying bare the circularity which had been imperceptible (or at least, harmless) to Victorian evolutionists. Ethnography could not give straight answers to
the prehistorian’s questions, but suggested plausible hypotheses and alternative
ways of explaining patterns. It, too, was useful in imagining the stages of sociocultural evolution:

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If we can no longer follow the Victorian ethnologists in the stages they deduced
from comparative ethnography, at least we may agree that in attempting to reconstruct those of prehistoric times from the contemporary evidence provided by
archaeology we should do so with the insights to be gained from a study of living
peoples at a broadly analogous stage of development. (Clark 1939: 173)

These insights did not so much come from descriptive ethnography, which was
only useful for suggesting alternative hypotheses, but from social anthropology à
la Radcliffe Brown and Malinowski, which ‘demonstrates how societies function
and provides [the prehistorian] with a theoretical model on which to base his
reconstructions’ (174). Functionalist social anthropology held a holistic view of
society which was promising to the prehistorian because ‘by viewing the archaeological material and related evidences as traces of societies that once functioned
as entities he may hope to understand it more fully’ (174). The whole could be
known from its parts, even if these were just material.
The creative interwar work of Childe and Clark tried to break away from the
sterile culture-historical approach of Kossinna and others. External migration and
diffusion were not abolished (cf. Childe 1935), but the internal workings of prehistoric society received more attention than before. Both scholars stressed the
need for understanding a society’s economic condition (Childe would eventually
approach it from Marxist theory, Clark stuck to functionalist anthropology); both
granted a restricted role to ethnographic analogy but kept the nineteenth-century
comparative method at arm’s length. A similar dissatisfaction with culture-historical archaeology was voiced by A.M. Tallgren (1937), a Finnish scholar who functioned somewhat as a bridge between Soviet and European archaeologists. Against
the Kulturkreis-theory, he said that ‘the economic system as a whole was of more
significance than nationality’; he, therefore, welcomed the Russians’ interest for
economy but severely criticized their Marxist dogmatism (which made him persona non grata in Stalinist Russia, but loved by individuals like Clark). Ethnography
helped him to debunk the basic tenets of culture-historical archaeology: modern
tribes in Northwest Siberia, for example, showed that ‘material culture often cannot be equated with a “people” ’ (1937: 156). Sometimes, people of one and the
same culture used very different material repertoires, whereas on other occasions
a particular material culture might crosscut ethnic divisions.
Anglo-Saxon culture-historical archaeology thought it could do away with
ethnogra­phy, but ethnography showed the fundamental misconception of the culture-historical paradigm. Such lesson was also concluded in an article by Donald
Thomson on Australian aboriginal camps. Solicited, encouraged and appreciated
by Grahame Clark, it was published in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society
in 1939. Thomson undertook what can be called the first ethnoarchaeological
field study ever: by analysing the material remains of aboriginal sites after they
had been abandoned, he did ethnographic fieldwork with an archaeological question in mind. That question concerned the impact of seasonality on the material
culture of hunter-gatherers. Since seasonal changes strongly affected food supply,
and as a consequence subsistence activity, occupation type and tool technology,

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an innocent archaeologist seeing the varieties in material culture ‘would be led to
conclude that they were different groups’ (Thomson 1939: 209). Material culture and ethnic culture did not overlap in a one-to-one way, Thomson suggested.
Though his detailed study contrasts with the theoretical expositions of Childe
and Clark, his article epitomizes the discussions of the 1930s: the critique on the
culture-historical assumption which interpreted archaeological cultures in ethnic
terms, the growing interest for ecological and economic factors (seasonality and
subsistence), and the circumscribed function granted to ethnography. Once the
scene which told prehistorians what the past had been, the ethnographic field had
now become the place to tell what the past did not look like. Ethnography helped
to criticize, to suggest alternatives, to give certain clues, but it did not present a
ready-made picture of the past.

Marxism and folklore
While the 1930s had been a period of intellectual fermentation, the 1950s witnessed a growing sense of frustration among archaeologists. The interwar ambitions of going beyond the mere typological classification of artifacts were still
regularly voiced, but it became less clear how this might be realized. Due to a
drastically shaken composition of the academic demography, in archaeology, as
in primatology, the war did not just impose an interruption of five years but of at
least fifteen years. In order to understand the postwar context, let us first return to
the two authors who had been responsible for the methodological and theoretical
upheaval of the 1930s.
After the Second World War, Childe defended his Marxist position much
more explicitly and elaborately than he had done before (McNairn 1980: 104-33;
Trigger 1980: 125; Green 1981: 94-105). He grew increasingly interested in the
issues of social evolution, economic history and technological progress and wrote
about these in books like Progress and Archaeology from 1945, History from 1947,
and Social Evolution from 1951, without, however, entirely denouncing the diffusionist stances from his earlier work. Childe’s thought, therefore, was an original
interpretation of Marxism without the theoretical dogmatism so prevalent in the
Soviet Union at the time. His interest for the writings of Marx and Engels inevitably brought him into contact with nineteenth-century social evolutionism, the
very school culture-historical archaeology had set itself up against. In particular,
the work of Lewis Henry Morgan, who had inspired Engels’ writings on the family, the state and property, exerted an increasingly important influence on Childe,
though he found it very old-fashioned at first (Trigger 1980: 95). He eventually
came to appreciate it better: ‘The sevenfold division adumbrated by Lewis H.
Morgan and refined by Friedrich Engels, with his more comprehensive knowledge
of European archaeology, is still unsurpassed’ (Childe 1946: 251). Childe borrowed Morgan’s notions of savageness, barbarism and civilization and interpreted
these in economic terms: savageness was related to a foraging subsistence, barbarism implied an agricultural economy, and civilization emerged with urbanization. The Neolithic and urban revolution marked the transition from one stage
to another. What Childe’s revolutionary view of prehistory came down to was in

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fact an integration of Thomsen’s three-age system (as it was refined by Lubbock),
Morgan’s evolutionist scheme and Engels’ materialist reading of it, all this blended with a honest appreciation of the diffusionist explanation. Through Childe’s
synthesis, the Victorian scheme savagery-barbarism-civilization continued to be
highly influential in twentieth century archaeology.
However, despite the evolutionist legacy, Childe remained deeply suspicious
of ethnographic analogy which had once formed the cornerstone of Morgan’s
scheme. He criticized ‘the shreds and patches’ approach which interpreted the
social structures of the Neolithic Swiss lake settlements in terms of Melanesian
analogues simply because both ‘lived in pile-dwelling, kept pigs, hafted stone celts
by means of sleeves, and use the bow’ (Childe 1946: 250). Such superficial and
isolated similarities had no relevance whatsoever. Cultures could only be compared ‘as organic wholes’, only if they occupied ‘the same relative position’ in the
evolutionist sequence (250). In Piecing together the Past (1956), Childe’s exposé on
archaeological interpretation, he argued that such comparisons could only shed
light on the more material sides of human societies, i.e. technology and economy.
Just as in 1936, he believed that similarity in these basic realms did not allow to
predict similarity in ritual, ideological and political terms. This old idea was now
rephrased with explicit reference to Marx. Whereas in good old Marxist tradition the socioeconomic and technological infrastructure was said to determine
the spiritual superstructure, Childe regretted that many scholars ‘confused “determines” with “causes” ’ (1956: 53). On the contrary, he said, Marx’s postulate
of determination implied ‘anything but mechanical causation’ so that a society’s
spiritual culture could not ‘be inferred with any confidence from the technology’
(53). Whereas Childe accepted the technological similarity between source and
target analogues, he denied that there was an unambiguous causal relation linking
technology to other parts of society. Consequently, ‘no existing society today is
so exactly representative of any past society [...] that its rituals or social institutions can provide precise and reliable explanations of the more puzzling relics and
monuments recovered from the past’ (55).
The use of ethnographic analogy was thus relegated to the more mundane
aspects of archaeological reconstruction, but even then Childe believed these afforded ‘only clues in what direction to look’, nothing in the sense of explanation
(49). Childe further maintained that the most promising results could be booked
if the modern society lived in a comparable environmental context or, better still,
if there was historical continuity between the analogues. Historical continuity
increased the relevance of the observed similarity between source and target analogues as it pointed to a shared cultural tradition. This was even possible in an
European context: ‘For interpreting archæological relics from northern Europe
analogies in contemporary folk-culture of that area are more useful and more reliable than any parallels, even though they seem more exact, from Tierra del Fuego
or British Columbia’ (48). In the absence of clear historical continuity, analogies were ‘always somewhat suspect’ (48). Childe used such historical parallels
with rural life in Scotland and the Hebrides in his interpretation of the Neolithic

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settlement of Skara Brae in the Orkneys which he had excavated during the
Interbellum (Trigger 1989: 263).
This enthusiasm for folklore studies as a means of elucidating later European
pre­history was an idea fervently defended by Grahame Clark. In a liber amicorum presented to O.G.S. Crawford—the man who had withheld a Victorian-like
enthusiasm for ethnographic parallels—Clark still cautioned against too sweeping comparisons and warned for circular reasoning. He found that claims, like
the ones made by Sollas’, which went ‘so far beyond the available evidence often
daunt rather than stimulate’ (1951: 55). On the other hand, the latter’s work had
also a great advantage over the nineteenth-century evolutionists: ‘Sollas was surely
right to imply that remains of extinct cultures can only be interpreted with any
certainty through modern analogues, if a continuous historical sequence can be
demonstrated between them’ (55). Clark believed that the contemporary folkculture of the most rural parts of Europe such as ‘the Celtic fringe of Britain,
the Scandinavian countries, the Alps, the Balkans and the Mediterranean basin’
often showed continuity of settlement ‘since neolithic and to some extent since
mesolithic times [...] down to our own day’ (57, 55). The basic premise was simply Tylorian: ‘Wherever civilization has developed, there are liable to be survivals
from earlier times in the culture of the countryside, from which the prehistorian
can profit’ (57). The study of folk culture could not only help by interpreting objects and excavated features otherwise enigmatic, it could also clarify the subsistence economy of prehistoric communities.
Interpreting the organic remains of the rich waterlogged Mesolithic site at Star
Carr, Clark thus drew in evidence from the least industrialized parts of Europe
to enhance his reconstruction of prehistoric activities (Clark 1954). Although he
equally looked at the material culture of the more remote contemporary Eskimos,
just like Childe, he kept an outspoken preference for analogies where there was a
demonstrable historical continuity. Such continuity was more weighty than environmental parallels because even if ecological surroundings were similar, ‘great diversity of cultural expression may be found’ (1953: 355). In his classic Prehistoric
Europe (1952) he repeated that one had to avoid ‘the indiscriminate seeking of
parallels among cultures far removed in time and space and with which no continuity of tradition can be traced’ (1952: 3). Consequently, when one was studying
the older phases of the European Stone Age, no historical parallels were available
so that ‘one is forced to go outside’ (Clark in Tax et al. 1953: 232). For Clark this
meant outside Europe; for the American scholar Slotkin this meant that when
investigating pre-sapiens populations the study of nonhuman primates might be
more profitable than the vague generalizations about contemporary human foragers (1952). While ethnographic analogy had once been crucial for understanding
the oldest Stone Age, it was now restricted to the more recent phases of prehistory
through the use of folk studies. The reliance on European folklore was already
intimated by individuals like Nilsson and McLennan, but Clark (1951; cf. 1974)
revived it in the context of the mid-twentieth-century interest for ecology: comparisons were to be made within the same environment and when there was historical continuity between source and target analogue. Similarity still determined

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Figure 8. Clark compared salmon traps currently used in Sweden with osier traps from the
Danish Stone age. Analogy could only be applied on a technological level when ecology and
economy were similar. This was the exact opposite of Tylor (figure 7) for whom similar technology was enough to infer a similar level of progress. Analogy in the first half of the twentieth century was more careful to balance the weight between premises and conclusion (Clark
1952: plate II)

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the success of an analogy, but instead of strict formal resemblance between material culture items (as in the nineteenth century), ecological parallelism and historical continuity were now regarded as the most relevant criterions. As with Childe,
Clark’s analogies were confined to the more material sides of archaeological reconstruction: for instance, Danish prehistoric objects like a Mesolithic fish trap,
a Neolithic canoe, and containers in birch wood were juxtaposed to recent examples from Finland in order to illustrate their function and production (figure 8).
Clark stressed, however, that where ‘comparative ethnography can prompt the
right questions; only archaeology [...] can give the right answers’ (1953: 357).
Clark’s interest for folklore analogies formed part of his more general desire
‘to break away from the object-fetishism’ which still plagued most of the culturehistorical archaeology of his time (Clark 1974: 40). Indeed, the opening sentences
of Prehistoric Europe (1952) were very clear about this: ‘Archaeology is often defined as the study of antiquities. A better definition would be that it is the study
of how men lived in the past.’ Clark’s ambition was first and foremost to find out
how prehistoric cultures adapted themselves to their surrounding environments
by means of economic organization. Viewing each culture as ‘the product of an
equation between social inheritance and the various elements in the biome’ (1953:
351), he laid out the foundations of the ecological approach which was to become
so prosperous in archaeology. As he considered Marxist theory ‘equally out of date’
as the speculations of the Victorian sociocultural evolutionists, attention for social
issues was rather minimal (1953: 346). Not surprisingly, Gordon Childe’s reaction after reading Prehistoric Europe was: ‘Yes, Grahame, but what have you done
about Society?’ (Clark 1974: 48). In the absence of an agreed upon social theory,
interpretation beyond the technological and economic level became problematic,
especially as ethnographic or folklore analogy was not believed to be of any help
here.

Postwar pessimism in Britain
Clark’s position exemplifies the stalemate which characterized so much of British
archaeology in the 1950s: the ambition to do more than culture-history archaeology, and the simultaneous frustration about the impossibility of reaching a genuine understanding of prehistory in social terms. This is not to say it was a impoverished decade of archaeological research. On the contrary, with individuals
like O.G.S. Crawford, Christopher Hawkes, Mortimer Wheeler, Cyril Fox, next
to Grahame Clark and Gordon Childe, and, in a later phase, Stuart Piggott and
Glyn Daniel on the scene, British archaeology went through one of its most colourful and active episodes. It was a period of numerous and spectacular excavations executed according to the best standards since Pitt Rivers; scientific methods
like pollen analysis, radiometric dating, and chemical determinations of the origin of raw materials were increasingly drawn upon; and photography, especially
aerial photography, made its entrance as an important tool for surveying. Yet all
these were methodological improvements, not theoretical ones. They dealt with
the reconnaissance, the recovery and the analysis of archaeological remains, not
with the problem of how to interpret them. Despite the disenchantment with

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the culture-historical paradigm, no convincing alternative ways of reconstructing
past societies were proposed (apart from Childe’s, but whereas his earlier, culturehistorical work had been greatly influential, few British scholars were at the outset
of the Cold War willing to accept the Marxist implications of his later work).
While establishing the culture-historical framework was an essential task of
the archaeologist, all scholars accepted it could not be the only one. Christopher
Hawkes, for instance, found that ‘ “when and where” archaeology should be a
means to a further end’ (1954: 156). Grahame Clark was concerned with ‘reconstructing rather than merely classifying the material traces of the past’ (1952:
3). Mortimer Wheeler noticed that for a long time ‘we have [...] been preparing
time-tables; let us now have some trains’ (1954: 215). And he added his famous
dictum that ‘the archaeologists is digging up, not things, but people’ (1954: v).
This was all well and good to say, the question remained how such objective could
be reached.
It was further complicated by the general and widespread belief that human
beings were historically unique entities which could not be treated in the same
terms as the rest of nature. This was a point stressed by nearly all archaeologists from the postwar decade. Childe mentioned ‘the distinctively human needs’
(1956: 49) which set Homo sapiens apart from the other animals. Clark noted that
modern archaeologists studied ‘the multitude of unique events conditioned by
cultural and even personal factors’ (1953: 354), in contrast to the Victorian evolutionists who had precisely failed ‘to appreciate the unique historical character
of cultures’. Consequently, the uniformitarian assumption at stake in comparative
anatomy and geology could not be applied to comparative ethnography: ‘The task
of reconstructing the life of prehistoric communities is inherently more difficult
and hazardous than deducing the behavior of Pleistocene glaciers from observations of existing glaciers obedient to immutable laws’ (354). Similarly, Wheeler
was ‘not over-readily tempted to equate development of human institutions with
the normal processes of organic evolution, to Darwinize human “progress” ’
(1954: 207). In his unparalleled style, he wrote: ‘We need not close our eyes to
Man-the-Jelly-Fish or Man-the-Whole-time-Food-gatherer in order to believe in
Man-with-Time-to-think-between-Meals, in Civilized Man, but the last is surely,
of overriding importance’ (208). Man was unique—even to the point of being
‘noble’ (Wheeler 1954: 209)—, cultures were diverse, and history was complex,
these were axioms of postwar archaeology. Many would have agreed with Clark in
his reflection on the 1950s: ‘People are more complex beings than fossil mammals
and archaeology is that much more difficult’ (1974: 54).
Much more difficult. Indeed, stressing human uniqueness had the consequence that generalizing statements could only be made on the most mundane
levels. Since every culture was a unique historical entity, since humans did not
obey to laws, since economy did not dictate the rest of society, little could be said
that was cross-culturally applicable. We have already seen how Childe and Clark
believed that ethnographic analogy could only be employed on the technological and economic level. In a more general sense it was believed that these were
the realms which the archaeologist could readily access; anything above it was

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harder to comprehend or simply beyond the grasp of the investigator. This was
precisely the idea of Christopher Hawkes’ famous ladder of inference, i.e. that
there was a hierarchy of inferential accessibility which went from material techniques, over subsistence-economics and social organization to ideational themes
like religious institutions and spiritual life (1954: 163). It says something about
the Zeitgeist that similar hierarchies were independently formulated at the same
time (cf. Childe 1946: 249; Smith 1955: 6) and that Hawkes’ version was eagerly
adopted by others (cf. Piggott 1959). Even if Hawkes’ ladder has become part of
every undergraduate training in archaeology, it is commonly forgotten that it, too,
was formulated within the discourse on human uniqueness versus human animality. ‘What is this climax?’ Hawkes wondered about his ladder:
It is a climax leading up from the more generically animal to the more specifically
human. [...] So the result appears to be that the more specifically human are men’s
activities, the harder they are to infer by this sort of archaeology. What it seems to
offer us is positively an anticlimax: the more human, the less intelligible. (1954:
162)

This, then, was the paradox of postwar British archaeology: firmly given to reconstructing humans in the past, its very definition of humanity (as uniqueness)
inhibited the realization of such reconstruction. How was one to remedy this
situation?
A first option entailed consulting anthropology, according to the adage ‘if
you’re stuck in the prehistoric past, go and check the anthropological present.’
This is what O.G.S. Crawford suggested. Thirty years after his editorial in the
first issue of Antiquity he still wholeheartedly supported ‘this business of using the
present to interpret the past’ (1960: 226). In his methodological work Archaeology
in the Field (1960), he devoted two chapters on the employment of anthropological data in archaeological contexts. Although he deplored the anthropologists’ lack
of attention for material culture (‘Too often we see page after unreadable page on
the systems of relationship, and little or nothing about the pots’ (222)), he praised
the high potential of ethnographic facts. Anthropology could ‘greatly help’ in the
‘imaginative process’ which all archaeological interpretation seemed to require
(224). After a travel through Sudan, Crawford was convinced that ‘people in many
regions are still living a life which is ‘prehistoric’ in the European sense’ (226) so
that Sudanese hut structures, markets, house types, pottery helped ‘to see the past
in the present’ (231). For example, since in Sudan a great number of hut structures did not imply a large population, the Dartmoor settlements in Devon might
have equally been thinly populated, he estimated.
Few were, however, ready to join Crawford’s enthusiasm for such nearly nineteenth-century-like analogies. Apart from Clark’s and Childe’s preference for folk
analogies, Hawkes called for ‘a sound critique of the comparative method in its
reasoning’ (1954: 168) and De Laet (1957: 95), whose methodological essay on
archaeology was translated into English, asked for ‘the greatest caution [...] whenever ethnology or folklore is called upon’. Unlike the Victorian evolutionists who
reasoned from the supposed similarity between savages, postwar archaeologists

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only found cultural variability. Childe stressed that a study of ‘the simpler peoples
of today reveals the endless diversity of human behaviour’ (1956: 55). And Smith
wrote:
It used to be thought that studies of surviving primitive peoples would provide the
necessary analogies for interpreting prehistoric societies; but in the event the extension of ethnological studies has only served to show what an incredible variety of
codes of behaviour in fact actuate human conduct. (Smith 1955: 4-5)

Anthropology, according to Smith, made interpretation even harder instead of
easier.
A second means of accessing ‘humans in the past’ consisted of improving the
empirical and methodological conditions of the archaeological research. Put simply: one needed more excavations and better methods. The postwar decade was
characterized by an increasing number of excavations, preferably at such rich sites
like Star Carr (excavated by Clark), the Somerset Levels (where Godwin worked)
and Maiden Castle (unearthed by Wheeler). Waterlogged sites where organic tools,
faunal and floral remains were exceptionally well preserved became popular. Clark,
for example, admitted that he undertook ‘a prolonged search’ in order to find a
promising site like Star Carr (1974: 50). Such preferences for rich sites would later
be criticized and balanced by off-site studies, surveys and excavation of minor
sites. In the 1950s, however, archaeology was ‘primarily a fact-finding discipline’
(Wheeler 1954: 200); good archaeology came from good sites. It suffices to look
at the titles of some books to realize the centrality accorded to excavation within
the archaeological enterprise: Field Archaeology (Atkinson 1946), Archaeology from
the Earth (Wheeler 1954), Still Digging (Wheeler 1955), Archaeology in the Field
(Crawford 1960), and so on. Apart from romantically glorifying the dig, such
books reveal the eminence of field methodology and techniques. It was commonly accepted that the excavator and the archaeologist should be one and the
same person (De Laet 1957: 77; Piggott 1959: 14); in a very literal sense, doing
archaeology came down to ‘digging up the past’ (Woolley 1930). Most theoretical
books were therefore in the first place treaties of field methodology. The American
scholar Walter W. Taylor (1948: 43) even contended that archaeology per se was
‘no more than a method and a set of specialized techniques[...]. The archeologist,
as archeologist, is really nothing but a technician.’ Probably at no other time in
the twentieth century were the standards of archaeological excavation as high as
in the 1940 and 50s, yet at no other time was the reconstruction of past societies
felt to be so problematic. Clark realized, however, that the wealth of evidence was
not the sole criterion: ‘even if a complete range of material equipment of a prehistoric group could be recovered [...] the problem of interpreting this correctly
would still remain more complex than is always allowed’ (1951: 64). According
to him, the emphasis on field methods could give a false impression of inferential
confidence:

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The very concentration on the material evidence, which distinguishes modern
archaeology, the careful scrutiny, the accurate description and illustration, the
circumstantial method of publication, all tend to make us feel that the conclusions
reached are more firmly based than they often can be. (1951: 63)

The archaeological database could equally be enhanced by calling in various sorts
of specialisms and what used to be called ‘scientific techniques’. Grahame Clark in
particular was a great supporter of this new tendency because it allowed ‘to extract
the fullest information’ (1952: 2). Petrological determinations of the origin of raw
material, chemical and spectographic analyses of bronze objects, archaeobotanical and palynological investigations, zooarchaeological study of faunal remains,
all these approaches were welcomed as they pulled archaeology away from the
mere cataloguing of tools to a fuller understanding of subsistence, diet, climate,
and biome. However, not everybody shared this optimism; many felt that a single-minded dependence on natural science might in the long run jeopardize human uniqueness and dignity. Wheeler was ‘regretting the prospect of archaeology
passing wholly into the hands of the biologist and the technician’ (1954: 210-1).
Smith warned against ‘the danger that archaeology might come to be equated
simply with a competence in handling a set of techniques’ (1955: 3). The longest and most famous attack against such scientism was Jacquetta Hawkes’ paper
‘The proper study of mankind’ published in Antiquity at a moment that ‘our
technological Frankenstein’s monster’ was already out of control (Hawkes 1968:
262). ‘We must remember,’ she wrote, ‘that all our ingenious devices, all our exact measurements and statistical analyses, are of no value in themselves’ (262).
Indeed, her entire paper aimed at ‘preventing the scientific and technological servant from usurping the throne of history’ (255). Whereas human uniqueness had
only just been saved out of the claws of a biological approach, the new scientistic
creed risked to entail a new form of ‘dehumanization’ (260). Biological substance
and spiritual being, no one described this ambiguous approach to humanity better
than Mortimer Wheeler (1954: 201) when he wrote: ‘Man is in some sense the
casket of a soul as well as five-shillings-worth of chemicals.’
In line with this ‘humanistic approach to the study of antiquity’ (Wheeler
1954: 209) there was an insistence by some scholars on the more noble, the more
civilized moments of our past. Wheeler urged British archaeologists to concentrate
upon ‘the riper achievements of Man as social animal’ (1954: 212); J. Hawkes
regretted ‘the relative neglect of the higher human achievements’ in recent archaeology (1968: 260). The attention should be less on the scraps and pieces of
humanity’s dismal beginnings, but on its monumental attainments at sites like
Mohenjo-Daro, Nippur and Stonehenge. All this came down to an appreciation of
humans as unique, symbolizing, and above all historical beings.

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A third strategy adopted to increase our understanding of the past was, therefore, firmly rooted in the historical tradition. Surely, more excavations, better
excavations, newer techniques, all this had resulted in larger amounts of valuable
evidence, yet how to interpret this evidence was another question altogether. The
reliance on natural science methods notwithstanding, archaeologists insisted that
what they were doing was history. It is important to bear in mind that scholars
like Wheeler, Childe and Hawkes did indeed descend from the historical-philological tradition. The qualities needed for archaeological interpretation were those
of the historian: Wheeler named ‘constructive imagination’ and ‘intuitive comprehension’, the archaeologist being ‘something of an artist’ (1954: 201). Likewise,
Crawford relied on his ‘creative imagination’, ‘imaginative thinking’ and a special ‘attitude of mind’ (1960: 224, 231). The American archaeologist Thompson
spoke of the ‘individual sensitivity’, the ‘intellectual ability’ and ‘the “feel” which
an investigator has for the material’ (1956: 327, 328, 332). Even if such notions might sound rather vague, they were in fact the warmly embraced tenets of
historical interpretation in the contemporary hermeneutic work of the philosopher-annex-archaeologist R.C. Collingwood. In his influential The Idea of History
(1946: 282) he argued that ‘the historian must re-enact the past in his own mind.’
Archaeological interpretation was not a set procedure of mechanical inferences, it
required certain skills such as intuition and empathy.
Another necessary skill was literary giftedness. If there are no set procedures
for interpreting archaeological material, imaginative writing becomes the last (and
often most elegant) resort. It is no coincidence that some of the finest writers
in archaeology of the twentieth century (like Glyn Daniel, Stuart Piggott and
especially Mortimer Wheeler) worked within this humanistic framework. For
Wheeler, whose eloquent prose has been repeatedly quoted here, the spade was
never ‘mightier than the pen; they are twin instruments’ (1954: v). He was very
much concerned with how words could vivify the past; this in fact was what ‘the
creative act of reasoned imagination’ came down to (4): facts had to be ‘infused
with rational intelligence’, so that archaeological writing was more than ‘prosaically revealing and cataloguing our discoveries’ (4). Jacquetta Hawkes, too, as a
late representative of this humanistic ideal, bitterly observed in 1968:
If there is anybody under the age of thirty or so producing historical writing of
the quality and humanity of the work of the young Gordon Childe, Mortimer
Wheeler, Christopher Hawkes, Stuart Piggott, or even in his more austere way,
Grahame Clark, I have failed to see it. (1968: 256)

Interestingly, only the young, pre-Marxist, culture-historical Childe is appreciated. Though Wheeler was well aware that he represented ‘the end of an active generation’ (1954: 215) of humanistic scholarship, historical orientation and

Trigger (1982) has noticed that the orientation of British prehistoric archaeology towards history
was also given in by the sort of social anthropology which prevailed at the time: structural functionalism regarded societies as stable entities so that change, the process archaeologists were most
interested in, was nearly viewed as ‘pathological’.

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literary erudition, J. Hawkes did not seem to realize that in a fundamental way
‘the times were a-changing.’
Anthropological inspiration, methodological and empirical refinement, historical intuition, and imaginative writing, if all these devices sought to meet the
requirement ‘to dig up people rather than mere things’, they were not necessarily
compelling to everyone so that a profound scepticism could linger on in the discipline. This was the extreme position put forward by M.A. Smith in her paper
on ‘The limitations of inference in archaeology’ which was read at the Prehistoric
Society (1955). She noted that archaeologists in recent years had reasserted the
discipline’s ‘essentially human aspect against a too persuasive “scientific” approach’
by trying ‘to re-create the past’ (3, 4). Smith outlined the difficulties involved with
such ambition. Deeply sceptical of any assistance of anthropology, she presented
an epistemological pessimism which went further than Hawkes’ hierarchy: ‘it is a
hopeless task to try to get from what remains to the activities by argument’ (6).
One could infer some aspects of prehistoric economics on the basis of the available evidence, but anything else was ‘nothing less than a demand for logical alchemy’ (6). Smith denied that there was a causal correlation between archaeological
statics and dynamics, there was ‘logically no necessary link’ between the two (6).
As a consequence, her text was littered with phrases like ‘we do not get very far’,
‘we can never know’, and ‘it would be impossible to understand’ (4, 6, 5). Smith,
therefore, argued that ‘unobtainable ends cannot be the proper ends for any subject’; it was even morally wrong:
Since historical events and the essential social divisions of prehistoric people don’t
find an adequate expression in material remains, it cannot be right to try to arrive
at a knowledge of them in archaeological interpretation. (7)

It may already be noted that the New Archaeologists, with their enormous epistemological optimism, regarded this as an inimical call to arms. Binford even used
the above quotation as the ironic motto of his first book. Smith, however, preferred not to say that ‘archaeology “re-creates”, or “reconstructs” at all; it merely
recovers what it can. That of itself is a sufficient programme of research’ (7). With
this statement we have come full circle: from the wish to go beyond the mere
study of objects, over the inherent difficulties to do so, we have now arrived at the
humble realization that archaeology should be confined to the objects proper.
Needless to repeat that the role of ethnographic analogy was minimal throughout. At best it had to satisfy itself with merely stirring the historical imagination
(as Crawford suggested), but in general it was confined to the most mundane
aspects of culture (as Childe explained), it could only be used when there was historical continuity (as Clark employed) and it was of no use for the more remote
phases of human prehistory (as Slotkin argued).

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The situation in the United States
Reading through American publications of the postwar decades, the differences
with what was happening in Britain seem at first sight enormous. Contrary to
the arabesque prose of Wheeler and J. Hawkes, the writing style of authors like
Walter Taylor, Gordon Willey, and Raymond Thompson was much more terse
and analytical. While British scholars aligned themselves with the field of history,
American archaeologists sided with anthropologists— just think of the famous
catchphrase ‘American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing’ (Willey and
Phillips 1958: 2). Taylor contended that when an archaeologist was interpreting
his evidence he was ‘an anthropologist who works in archaeological materials’
(1948: 43), while Willey and Phillips (1958) sought to integrate American archaeology into general anthropological theory. Archaeology was one of the four fields
Boas had defined for anthropology (next to linguistics, physical anthropology
and cultural anthropology) so that the conceptual links were much closer than in
Europe with its mutual incomprehension between prehistory and anthropology
(Trigger 1982). Theoretical debate in archaeology, for instance, was conducted
in anthropological publications like Anthropology Today (Kroeber 1953) and the
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology (which played an increasingly prominent role
for archaeological discussion during the 1950s and 60s).
However, there was no yawning gap between the Old and the New World as
ar­chaeologists in Britain and North-America did communicate with each other
(cf. Clark 1953; Willey 1953; Hawkes 1954). Individuals like Childe and Hawkes
published important theoretical papers in American journals like the Southwestern
Journal of Anthropology and American Antiquity (Childe 1946; Hawkes 1954).
And, more importantly, some of the fundamental preoccupations with theory and
methodology were alike on both sides of the Atlantic.
First of all, the incipient discontent with culture-historical archaeology was
as out­spoken as in Britain. Though much of postwar American archaeology dealt
with taxonomy, stratigraphy, seriation, typology, and classification, Braidwood’s
dictum that one should not loose sight of ‘the Indian behind the artifact’ was
widely supported. An innovative thinker like Walter Taylor argued at length
that mere culture history could not be enough; his influential essay A Study of
Archaeology (1948) was in fact one long critique against such myopic vision of the
discipline’s aims. Gordon Willey agreed and said that next to a ‘historical’ objective which entailed ‘the descriptive identification and space-time arrangements
of data’, archaeologists should also focus on a ‘processual’ objective, which was
‘the functional or use identification of interpretations of data’ (1953: 363). Later
this second level was even conceived in still broader terms, not just functional
interpretation: ‘we are no longer asking merely what but also how and even why’
(Willey and Phillips 1958: 6). At the influential Wenner-Gren meeting of 1952,
Willey said: ‘Contextual reconstruction or descriptive integration, the translation
of cultural and human fossils into an image of life, is now the primary problem
area of archaeology’ (in Tax et al. 1953: 251). This was exactly the programme
that Clark and Wheeler had been advocating.

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Also similar to currents in British archaeology was the awareness that such
recon­structive ambition was more difficult and necessarily implied a ‘subjective
element in archaeological reference’ (Thompson 1956). Thompson argued that
every interpretation consisted of an ‘indicative’ and ‘probative’ phase (hypothesisformulation and hypothesis-testing as it would now be called) and that a subjective element was injected into both. Again, the quality of the interpretation depended on the special skills of the researcher: ‘The individual investigator with his
unique combination of interpretative skills provides the only possible means for
the reconstruction of the cultural context of an archaeological collection’ (331).
In terms of ethnographic analogy, Taylor who discussed nearly every aspect of
Americanist archaeology was surprisingly brief on it as he found it ‘possibly gratuitous’ (1948: 171) to remark that such ethnographies were useful. Like Clark, he
urged to go further than the interpretation of the use and function of artifacts to
a wider appreciation of the archaeological cultural context. Willey introduced the
terminological distinction between a ‘general comparative analogy’ and ‘specific
historical analogy’, the former involving ‘cultures of the same general level of technological development, perhaps existing under similar environmental situations’,
the latter involving ‘a presumed or reasonably demonstrated cultural continuity
from prehistoric to historic times, on into a living ethnology in the same area’ (in
Tax et al. 1953: 229). Willey indicated very clearly which of the two he preferred:
it was with the specific historical analogy that we were ‘on stronger ground for
interpretations’ (229) and where ‘the most immediate progress’ (252) was to be
expected. This was identical to Clark’s and Childe’s preference for analogies drawn
from folklore studies where there was demonstrable historical continuity. It too
continued the long-standing prewar tradition in American archaeology to compare excavated relics with contemporary native descendants. Throughout the first
half of the century, the direct-historical approach was regarded as the strongest
form of analogy as it increased the amount of observed similarity.
However, Thompson attributed a far greater role to ethnographic analogy than
that of tool for interpretation. In his opinion, the ethnographic present could be
used to verify the archaeologist’s hypothesis about the past. ‘The artifact-behavior
correlation’ one suggested for the past must be ‘a common occurrence in ethnographic reality’ (1956: 329). Drawing on the logic of John Dewey, he presented a
detailed mechanism of analogical reasoning by formal similarity:
What actually happens is that [the investigator] compares an artifact type which
is derived from archaeological data with a similar type in a known life situation.
If the resemblance in the form of the two artifact types is reasonably close, he infers
that the archaeological type shares the technique, behavior, or other cultural activity which is usually associated with the ethnographic type. (329)

This was one of the first times that the logic of analogy was explicitly considered. If Willey thought that ethnographic analogy was a matter of ‘take it or leave
it’ and that one could do without, Thompson held that ‘archaeological inference is
impossible without recourse to analogy’. These proved to be prophetic words.

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Cultural continuity
The period between the heyday of Victorian evolutionism and the rise of neoevolutionism in archaeology, roughly speaking the half century between 1910 and
1960, is traditionally described as an essentially Kossinna-like culture-historical
archaeology where ethnographic analogy had no say. Though this was the case at
the extremes of the period, i.e. at the start with Kossinna and the young Childe
and at the end with Hawkes and Smith, in the intervening period ethnography
did play a considerable role in archaeological interpretation, albeit more restrictedly than in Victorian anthropology of New Archaeology.
Contrary to the holistic projections of Morgan, Tylor and Sollas, ethnographic
analogy was now generally limited to the clarification of more humble issues like
tool function and subsistence. Non-modern societies were no longer regarded as
representing universal stages of social, legal, religious, and intellectual development but as cultures with particular technologies and economies living in a specific social and ecological environment. In the absence of a hierarchy of sociocultural
complexity, analogies were now considered to be safest when societies in similar
technological and environmental contexts were compared, preferably when they
demonstrated historical continuity. As a consequence, the direct-historical approach was advocated by scholars with the most diverse theoretical positions. No
matter whether one’s interest was in Marxism, ecology, or culture-history, cultural
continuity was praised as the best warrant for analogical inference.
At the heart of the direct-historical approach was a confidence in similarity as
the base for analogy. Next to resemblances in ecology, economy and technology,
evidence for long-term relations between the present and the past was considered
to top the amount of observed similarity between source and target. Indeed, the
purpose of archaeologists was to find a living analogue which approximated the
past society under consideration. The degree of proximity was seen as the decisive
yardstick for evaluating source analogues. The closer in time and space the analogue was found, the better.
Such insistence on similarity obviously recalls the nineteenth-century obsession with that criterion. However, there are important differences. Even if both
forms of analogical reasoning relied on the number of resemblances, the meaning
of similarity depended on the broader, often implicit theoretical framework one
was working in. In the Victorian sense similarity was defined in terms of relative
position on the sociocultural ladder. In the sense of culture-historical archaeology
it was intimately related to the concept of archaeological culture as a space-time
entity developing within a given context of social, historical, and ecological parameters. For a Victorian evolutionist, similarity meant similarity of stage, regardless of ‘place on the map or date in history’ as Tylor argued. For a culture-historical
archaeologist, it meant the exact opposite: spatial proximity and historical continuity were the very determinants of the analogy’s quality. It was precisely this version of relevant similarity that started to be challenged in the early 1960s.

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The dilemma of the New Archaeology
The movement in North-American archaeology which emerged in the early 1960s
and came to be known by the name of the ‘New Archaeology’ initially maintained
a rather ambiguous attitude towards the use of ethnographic analogy. Whereas
on the one hand it tried to move away from the strict confines of the previously
popular direct-historical approach, it did not wholeheartedly embrace a generalcomparative approach on the other hand either. Attracted to the neo-evolutionist arguments put forward by the anti-Boasians in cultural anthropology, Lewis
Binford, the broadly acknowledged leader of the New Archaeology, sought to align
archaeology more closely with anthropology. The aim was to make the discipline
more scientific, to provide it with a methodology far more rigorous than hitherto
seen, and to supply it with reasoning in terms of logical deduction rather than intuitive induction. Yet this entailed a fundamental dilemma: the most obvious procedure archaeology could draw upon to benefit from work in anthropology was
by analogy. But since this was an inductive procedure, archaeologists were at pains
to reconcile it with their deductive ambitions. There was, so to speak, a clash between the New Archaeology’s association with neo-evolutionist anthropology on
the one hand, and its inspiration in positivist philosophy of science on the other.
As a consequence, the notion of ethnographic analogy remained profoundly ambivalent throughout the 1960s. While the conviction that much could be learnt
from contemporary non-industrialized societies drove several archaeologists to the
ethnographic field, at the same time scholars constantly avoided a direct application of the insights gained to specific archaeological contexts. How this dilemma
was circumvented can only be understood if we first direct our attention to some
of the revolutionary publications which set the New Archaeology in motion.

The new analogy and the New Archaeology
Two papers from the early 1960s were instrumental in changing the climate of
opinion on the aims and methods of Americanist archaeology as it had been canonized by Willey in the late 1950s. They were Robert Ascher’s ‘Analogy in archaeological interpretation’ (1961) and Lewis Binford’s ‘Archaeology as anthropology’
(1962). Published in the discipline’s leading journals at the time—Southwestern
Journal of Anthropology and American Antiquity respectively—they were widely
distributed, widely read and widely commented upon.
Ascher’s paper started with the observation that whereas the archaeology of
the 1950s had been greatly successful in the formulation and refinement of concepts, the gathering and processing of data, and the crafting of general syntheses,
hardly any progress had been made in terms of interpretation—this was precisely
the interpretative difficulty which had also been notified by the previous generation. Ascher cited the pessimistic publications by Hawkes, Smith and Thompson
and regretted that they were ‘not undertaking interpretation at all’ (1961: 321).
He concurred, however, with Thompson that ‘the most widely used of the tools
of archaeological interpretation is analogy’ (317) but differed from him in the
importance attached to personal competence. According to him, analogies, when

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properly used, could take archaeological interpretation beyond the level of individual sensitivity, although this was no easy business. Ascher was well aware of
‘the fact that analogy in archaeological interpretation has suffered chronic ambiguity since the nadir of classical evolutionary simplicity’ (322). Ascher explicitly
signalled the many anachronisms in the arguments of Sollas and was ‘anxious to
avoid the mistakes of the early evolutionary school’ (319). Aware of the problems
involved with analogical reasoning yet refusing to accept the resigned pessimism
of the previous generation, Ascher’s ambition consisted in ‘placing analogy on a
firmer foundation’ (322).
Following Willey, he distinguished between an analogy based on historical continuity (encompassing the direct-historical approach in the New World and the
folk-culture approach in the Old World) and one based on a comparison of unrelated cultures ‘which manipulate similar environments in similar ways’ (319). The
latter he called ‘the new analogy’ (although he traced its history back to Childe
and Clark) and, contrary to Willey, he was firmly in favour of it: it enhanced our
interpretation for the tract not covered by historical continuity, a tract ‘consisting
of over ninety-five percent of human history and a large proportion of the globe’
(319). Though Ascher acknowledged Clark’s folk-analogies, he was more enthusiastic about the latter’s employment of an Eskimo parallel. In his interpretation of
Star Carr, Clark had inferred that women must have been present because there
was evidence of skin-working, a task which was commonly performed by women
among the Eskimos of North-America and Greenland. Star Carr was thus more
than an all-male hunting camp, but represented the remains of an entire community. Ascher praised this argument ‘as an excellent example of the new analogy’ (320). In the absence of historical continuity, the new analogy proceeded by
considering potential source analogues and by systematically eliminating the least
productive ones in order to select ‘the best solution’ (322). Elimination happened
on the basis of economy, of distance between source and target (temporal, spatial
and morphological), and of ‘closeness of fit of the relationships between forms
in the archaeological situation with relationships between forms in the hypothesized analogous situations’ (323). What Ascher did was select the best available
source by means of the number of formal similarities it presented to the source.
Similarity, i.e. closeness of fit, determined the validity of the analogy. In this
sense, he was perhaps more nineteenth-century in his outlook than he wished to
acknowledge. The important aspect to remember, however, was that he broke the

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interpretative impasse archaeology had become entrenched in during the 1950s.
Against Smith, he said that his ‘clear systematic approach’ required ‘no touch of
alchemy’ (323). Against Hawkes, he said that an interpretation beyond the technical and subsistence-connected level was ‘only apparently remote’ (324).
If a certain epistemological optimism surfaced in Ascher’s article, how much
more unmitigated was it in ‘Archaeology as anthropology’, Binford’s landmark
paper written during an overnight boost of anger which shook the entire discipline. Seriously discontent with the culture-historical work of his teachers James
Griffin and Robert Braidwood, the young Binford turned towards the neo-evolutionism advocated by Leslie White, the statistical methods of Albert Spaulding,
and later also the positivist philosophy of science of Carl Hempel. ‘White was
my philosophical model, and Spaulding was a methodological model, and Griffin
became increasingly the challenge’ (Binford in Sabloff 1998: 13). In an interesting and amusing autobiographical reflection (though not entirely freed from
self-glorifying justification), Binford (1972a) recalled how he grew dissatisfied
with the criterions of individual competence, idiosyncratic intuition and personal
acquaintance with the material which characterized the previous generation—the
very criterions Thompson had been defending. Griffin was characterized as the
prototype of the archaeologist who interpreted by intuition: ‘He loved the word
“influence” [...]. Diffusion-and-the-plotting-of-cultural-influences-from-one-region-to-another became the name of the game’ (1972a: 3); Braidwood was said
to be ‘the Sir Mortimer Wheeler of Rolling Prairie, Indiana’ (11). On the other
hand, Binford appreciated Taylor’s attempt to do more with archaeology, but said
that his method rested just as much on the ‘magic’ of interpretation as the work
of Griffin and others had done: ‘Taylor had the aims but not the tools’ (1972a:
8). However, anthropolo­gists like White, ‘the dragon slayer of Boasianism’ who
taught Binford that Boas was ‘muddle-headed’, made their conclusions depend on
sound reasoning rather than acquired authority: ‘His logic was made explicit, his
interpretations were put out for criticism, and he supplied you with the criteria
and rules for criticism’ (6, 7, 8). Yet cultural anthropologists taught Binford more
than just reasoning. White’s definition of culture as ‘man’s extrasomatic means
of adaptation’, Steward’s programme of a cultural ecology, Sahlins and Service’s
critical reappraisal of nineteenth-century sociocultural evolutionism, American
anthropologists in the late 1950s shed the shackles of the extreme historical particularism of the Boasian school and focused on cross-cultural comparisons, on

Some sections of Binford’s autobiography deserve further attention, especially where he likened the
rise of the New Archaeology with the rise of Darwinism. If the traditional archaeologists were like
‘little Linnaean beings classifying things for the sake of classification’, White and Spaulding were
‘two Darwins [...] who together could provide some meaning for the endless taxonomic schemes of
the archaeologists. White essentially refused to take archaeology seriously, and Spaulding appeared
disinterested in theory. I was going to be the Huxley, the mouthpiece.’ Like Darwin’s bulldog,
Binford used conferences and meetings as the preferred occasions for spreading the word; like his
flamboyant Victorian predecessor, he was ‘angry, hurt, and intolerably arrogant’ (Binford 1972a: 9,
12).

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adaptation, ecology and social evolution (Trigger 1989: 289-94). Not surprisingly, their works figured prominently in the bibliography of Binford’s seminal
paper.
Reading through ‘Archaeology as anthropology’, the differences with the older
generation become immediately apparent on the level of literary style. The elegance and clarity of the humanist prose was now overshadowed by sentences on
‘the demonstration of a constant articulation of variables within a system and the
measurement of the concomitant variability among the variables within the system’ (Binford 1962: 21). Although Binford’s language was notoriously abstruse
and obscure—‘I never could write [...]. English was a mystery to me,’ he once
admitted (1972a: 6)—this change of literary style revealed a broader shift in the
aims of the discipline. According to Binford, the objective of archaeology was no
longer imaginative reconstruction of the past, but logical explanation of differences
and similarities between archaeological complexes. He drew a sharp distinction
between ‘explication’ (or reconstruction) and ‘explanation’ (or demonstration).
Had individuals like Clark and Willey been calling for reconstruction beyond
mere classification (the very ambition Smith had been so sceptical about), Binford
now asked for rigorous explanation in terms of structures, systems, and processes.
Along with Ascher he stated that ‘archaeologists have not made major explanatory
contributions to the field of anthropology’ (1962: 21). And this is exactly what
he attempted to alter, i.e. going beyond the ‘theoretical vacuum’ of the culturehistorical approach: ‘We cannot afford to keep our theoretical heads buried in the
sand,’ he wrote (21, 31-2).
Viewing cultures in terms of systems with integrated and interacting subsystems and regarding material culture as the extrasomatic means of adaptation,
Binford presented a systemic view in which ‘technology [was] closely related to the
nature of the environment’ (22). Although already at that stage he distinguished
it from a mere ‘environmental determinism’ (22), it is clear that the previous notions on human uniqueness and nobility rapidly evaporated in such materialist
and often mechanicist paradigm. Steward’s cultural ecology taught that cultures
were closely related to the potentials and constraints of the physical environment,
even if they were not dictated by it.

Marvin Harris’ cultural materialism continued to the neo-evolutionist renaissance in American cultural anthropology throughout the 1960s. Not surprisingly, he applauded ethnographic analogy and
‘the extrapolation from contemporary primitives to paleolithic societies’ (cf. 1968: 156).
In the New Archaeologists’ prose logic became more important than literature. The past was no
longer vivified through words but reconstructed through arguments. Imaginative writing, therefore,
disappeared as a valuable asset to the archaeological enterprise. The New Archaeologists fell back
upon a scientistic, jargon-laden and often pretentious language (which was attacked by many of
its opponents)—the writings of David Clarke and Lewis Binford being a case in point. In order to
make archaeology more scientific, it helped to substitute the humanist literacy for the analytical
writing style which prevailed in the natural sciences and positivist philosophy. Of all the New
Archaeologists, Kent Flannery was perhaps the only one whose writings escaped the terse and dense
prose of his fellow-innovators. Binford, however, maintained that ‘the clearer writing is, the more
ambiguous the terms are’ (in Sabloff 1998: 63).

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The most important consequence of this systemic framework was that it resulted in much more epistemological optimism. Indeed, instead of a historically
unique and thus elusive entity, culture now became an explicable parameter within a systemic whole. If one believed that all cultural subsystems were integrated
and in some way related to the structural properties of the physical environment,
it became possible to extrapolate an understanding of one subsystem (like material
culture) to other subsystems. In reply to Hawkes’ and Smith’s pessimism, Binford
wrote:
It has often been suggested that we cannot dig up a social system or ideology.
Granted we cannot excavate a kinship terminology or a philosophy, but we can
and do excavate the material items which functioned together with these more
behavorial elements within the appropriate cultural subsystems. (1962: 23)

And he added very forcefully that the structure of artifact assemblages ‘should
and do present a systematic and understandable picture of the total extinct cultural
system’ (23, original italics). In the archaeological record, there were ‘technomic’,
‘sociotechnic’ and ‘ideotechnic’ artefacts which were respectively related to the
technological, social and ideological subsystem. The total cultural system was thus
reflected in its material manifestations. Hawkes’ ladder of inference lay flat on the
ground.
‘The past is knowable,’ Binford once said (1968b: 99). The interpretative
problem archaeologists ran into was not to be solved by empirical adequacy but by
methodological ingenuity. Of course, good, well-preserved sites were an asset, but
not a sufficient condition for understanding the past. It is telling that, throughout his career, which spans almost four decades, Binford never excavated a major
site like Skara Brae or Star Carr. Unlike Childe and Clark, his name is not immediately associated with a particular dig. Of course, he worked on archaeological
digs—first of native American settlements in Illinois, later of Palaeolithic sites in
the French Dordogne—but the emphasis of his most important contributions was
on theoretical problems and methodological issues, in particular statistics of lithic
assemblages and later faunal analyses. The Mousterian debate and the dispute on
early-hominid scavenging, to name but two examples, were predominantly based
on reanalyses of excavated material rather than on personal digs.
A new language (analytical), a new objective for archaeology (explanation), a
new theoretical framework (systems theory, cultural ecology), a new epistemology
(unmitigated optimism), and a new methodology (re-analysis), the paper implied

This, in fact, holds true for the other side of the ‘Binclarke’ tandem as well. David Clarke’s work
(1968; 1972b) was in the first place a theoretical reconsideration based on available material, not a
study derived from personally excavated material. Archaeology was more than digging up the past;
the ‘undisciplined empirical discipline’ did not proceed by empirical improvement alone.

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a radical break with the previous generation. Surprisingly, somehow, it remained
completely silent about the issue of ethnographic analogy. ‘Archaeology as anthropology’ was an attempt to bring the field of archaeology within the theoretical debates that had been going in anthropology, it was not an attempt to bring
anthropology into archaeology. Since entire past societies were reflected in the
material remains, there was no need to pull in external analogies. Binford’s epistemological optimism made the use of such ethnographic expedient redundant.
In its earliest stage, then, the New Archaeology could do without ethnographic
analogy. However, despite Binford’s silence on the theme, in an indirect way his
paper helped to kindle a renewed archaeological interest for ethnography. The
idea that material culture could reflect the total cultural system begged the question of how this actually happened in practice today. In the second half of the
1960s, a younger generation of archaeologists grew increasingly fascinated by how
the correlation between social practice and material remains manifested itself in
the contemporary world.

Fieldwork and cautionary tales
Already in 1939, Thomson was breaking new ground when he studied the remains
of contemporary aboriginal settlements in Australia. It was reinvented in the
1950s by his near namesake Thompson who looked at modern Yucatan pottery
making traditions (cf. Longacre 1978). Likewise, Crawford (1960) upon his return from Sudan argued that archaeologists had to do this sort of fieldwork themselves instead of reading the works of sociocultural anthropologists. And Ascher
embraced the suggestion, made by Kleindienst and Watson (1956), that ‘the archaeologist turn to the living community to compile his own inventories’ (1961:
323). Well before the start of the New Archaeology, then, several archaeologists
thought about or even undertook ethnographic fieldwork from an archaeological
perspective. From the early 1960s onwards, however, this idea was put into practice by an increasing number of scholars. Ascher studied the Seri Indians in western Mexico (1962; 1968); Patty Jo Watson (1966) observed traditional rural life
in Iran as part of a research project on early villages in the Near East; Karl Heider
(1967) worked on the material remains of contemporary farmers in New Guinea;
Richard Gould (1968), an ethnographer by training, turned to material aspects in
his study of hunter-gatherers in Western Australia; Nicholas David (1971) studied
settlement layout in Western Africa; Robson Bonnichsen (1972) did the same on

The question has often been raised to what extent the New Archaeology was really new (Binford
1968b; Clarke 1972b: 53-7). Whereas some writers have argued it represented a scientific revolution
in the Kuhnian sense, others contended that all elements of the so-called new paradigm were there
beforehand (cf. Sterud 1973; Meltzer 1979; Trigger 1989: 295). The insistence on ecology was already anticipated by the work of Clark, the system approach was borrowed from the New Geography
and cultural ecology, the adaptationist view of culture came from neo-evolutionist anthropology,
and the epistemological optimism echoed Taylor’s visionary programme for archaeology. Although
most of the elements were there before the 1960s, a younger generation of archaeologists, under
the leadership of Lewis Binford, integrated them into a coherent alternative which was as a whole
quite innovative—although the fierce polemics of the 1960s and the self-perception of the New
Archaeologists certainly exaggerated the break with the past.

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an Indian site in the Canadian Rockies; and so on. Several suggestions were made
as to the name of such ethnography for archaeological purposes. Watson called
it ‘action archaeology’ (1966; cf. Kleindienst and Watson 1956); Gould preferred
‘living archaeology’ (1968) and Chang was presumably the first to use the term
‘ethnoarchaeology’ in a modern sense. Dealing with the question who should do
the fieldwork he wrote:
Should the ethnologist observe and record these data so that they might someday
be of some use to an archaeologist? Or should he do so in any event? Or should
there perhaps be a branch of archaeology (ethnoarchaeology) to take care of such
things? (Chang 1967: 230)

At the same time, other scholars were raiding the existing ethnographic literature
to extract archaeologically relevant materials: Lewis Binford assembled ethnohistorical accounts of hide-smoking among North-American Indians (1967); James
Hill checked descriptions of the architecture of contemporary Hopi and Zuñi
Indians against excavated pueblos (1968); Kent Flannery scanned ethnographies
for social parallels to his Oaxaca society in Mexico (1968); David Clarke looked
at Bantu-Africa to substantiate his analytical categories (1968: 366-8); and Peter
Ucko looked for descriptions of funerary practices on a world-wide scale (1969).
The focus was largely on pastoral and agricultural societies; at this stage modern
hunter-gatherers received only limited ethnoarchaeological attention (Gould being the only exception). It was only in the 1970s that foraging societies would
constitute the main object of ethnoarchaeology.
Despite this increased interest in ethnography among a younger generation
of ar­chaeologists, there was no unified objective for the enterprise so that ethnography came to perform several functions, depending on the author. Yet all of
these early ethnoarchaeologi­cal attempts, despite their diversity, had one thing in
common: the role bestowed upon ethnography was rather minimal since archaeologists were at pains to circumvent the problem of analogy. Typically, publications from those years offer fairly detailed descriptions of the material aspects of
pre-industrial life in the Near East, Africa, Australia or native America with a few
hints in the introductory and concluding sections of the article on the broader
archaeological relevance and on the need to pursue such work. Yet how the bridge
from minute ethnography to archaeological conclusion was to be made, was generally left out.
Patty Jo Watson’s study of rural life in a small village community in northern
Iran was already undertaken in 1959-60 as a part of Robert Braidwood’s Iranian
Prehistoric Project. She detailed the land tenure system, the agricultural practices,
the village architecture, the family composition, the material culture and argued
that what was observed in modern Iran could be extrapolated towards ‘life in the
earliest villages (approximately 7000-6500 B.C.)’ (1966: 19). Despite her innovative fieldwork, her theoretical framework came down to a straightforward direct

The term ‘ethno-archaeologist’ had already been used in another context by the American ethnologist
Hewkes at the turn of the century (Stiles 1977).

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historical approach. In this sense, she continued the tradition of Willey and Clark
but injected it with a new method, i.e. ‘action archaeology’.
Similarly, Hill’s functional interpretation of thirteenth-century architectural
remains in Arizona through ethnographic analogy with contemporary Pueblo villages (1968), belonged to the long-standing tradition in Americanist archaeology
of direct-historical reasoning, the only difference being that Hill was more systematic and explicit in his assessment. The same goes for Anderson’s interpretation of
tools from Arizona through a Hopi analogy (1969) and Oswalt’s study of a Crow
village in Alaska to explain nearby archaeological sites (Oswalt and VanStone
1967; Oswalt 1974). Oswalt very explicitly said that specific historical analogy
was ‘the essence of ethnoarchaeology’; one had to work ‘with similar cultures living at essentially the same period of time and in the same locality’ (1974: 6).
Gould’s ‘living archaeology’ among the Ngatatjara of Western Australia had
even more limited ambitions. Although he claimed to investigate ‘the “rules” of
aboriginal site behavior’, comparable to ‘rules of grammar in a particular language’ (1968: 118, 101), in the end this resulted only in some general statements
on Ngatatjara sites. The bulk of his early ethnoarchaeological work dealt with
campsites, hunting blinds, wellsites, ceremonial sites, and painted caves; they were
described with an amount of detail which was rare for an ethnologist, but the attempt to shed light on some aspect of prehistory, indigenous or not, was bracketed.10 In the conclusion, the Ngatatjara were said to ‘present new possibilities
for archaeological interpretation’ but how this was to be done was not specified.
Likewise, Stanislawski (e.g. 1974) observed contemporary Hopi traditions of pottery making and described them with admirable precision, but the feedback to
specific archaeological problems remained at bay. At this early stage of ethnoarchaeology, pure documentation of rapidly vanishing traditions was regarded as a
legitimate objective per se. Such preliminary description, it was believed, could
prod the archaeological imagination and alleviate the ethnocentric bias.
In a very similar sense, ethnographic literature was thought ‘to widen the horizons of the interpreter’, as Peter Ucko claimed in his article on funerary remains
(1969: 262). Ucko had scanned the available ethnographic literature on mortuary practices not to find ‘a one-to-one correlation between the acts of tribe A and
the remains of culture B’ but in order ‘to suggest the sorts of possible procedures
which may result in the traits characterizing culture B’ (263). Just like Crawford
and Hawkes had intimated before him, ethnographic analogy was there to ‘stimulate your imagination’. If there was continued cultural tradition, it had to be welcomed. But if there was none, the comparison depended on ‘closeness of the fit’,
that is, the amount of similarity (263). From his survey, for instance, Ucko learnt
that the richness of a grave did not necessarily imply that one had to do with a
wealthy individual.
10 In later work, however, Gould has tried to incorporate his ethnographic observations into his archaeological interpretations of the same region (e.g. 1974). Yet even then he remained within the
confines of a direct-historical analogy, though the time range he covered consisted of several thousands of years. Continuous models, as he preferred to call them, had ‘an inherently higher degree of
probability’ (1974: 39).

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Flannery’s (1968) use of ethnography followed the more traditional line of
looking in the present for an entity which paralleled the excavated past. Having
defined that prehistoric Oaxaca was a developing society where individuals used
imported and exotic raw materials to enhance social status, he sought ethnographic similes to buttress this conclusion. The Tlingit and the fur trade and the jade
trade in highland Burma were invoked to substantiate this claim. Even if the
choice was rather gratuitous, ethnography was thought to corroborate archaeological conclusions.
Ethnography could also undermine certain archaeological dogmas. David
Clarke (1968: 365-88) used ethnographic literature on the Bantu to show that
there was no total correlation between language family, ethnopolitical group,
physical race and material culture. Here, ethnography served to debunk the tenets
of culture-historical archaeology (in particular the equation that ‘archaeological
cultures are ethnic groups’), much along the same lines as Tallgren had done with
his Siberian case-study in the 1930s. According to Clarke’s ‘polythetic culture
concept’, there were no neat boundaries between distinct cultures, only affinity
levels.
Likewise, White and Thomas (1972) showed that much of the formal types
archae­ologists worked with had no ethnic relevance whatsoever. Participating in
the long-standing debate as to whether archaeological taxa should reflect indigenous mental templates (emic or etic taxonomy), their study in the highlands of
New Guinea showed that native stone-knappers drew quite different taxonomic
distinctions than the archaeologists had done. They used this emic taxonomy to
interpret prehistoric finds from the same region and suggested it might have a
wider application.
As time went on, this critical function of ethnography became more and more
prominent in archaeological debate and the journal World Archaeology, which
started to appear in 1969 under the editorship of Peter Ucko, became an important locus for the ventilation of such criticisms.11 For many archaeologists in the
late 1960s-early 1970s, the living present became not simply the touchstone for
our ideas about the remote past; it was first of all the place where our ‘methodological naiveté’ (Binford 1968b: 96) and ‘archaeological innocence’ (Clarke 1973)
became blatant. The most popular use of ethnoarchaeology consisted of providing the archaeologist with cautionary tales. No matter whether one reads Heider’s
analysis of the Dugum Dani in New Guinea (1967), Cranstone’s paper on the
‘Neolithic’ Tifalmin in the same country (1971), David’s interpretation of the
Fulani compound in Cameroon (1971), or Bonnichsen’s study of Millie’s camp in
Canada (1972), the message was essentially the same, i.e. that archaeologists are
poorly equipped to recover and interpret what has actually happened on a specific
site. In this sense, ethnoarchaeological cautionary tales reverberated the interpretative pessimism of British prehistorians in the 1950s. David invited the reader
11 In 1971, World Archaeology had a theme issue on ethnography for archaeologists. Of the five papers,
three were confined to the safe direct-historical approach (Gould 1971; Van der Merwe and Scully
1971; Lauer 1971) and two were straightforward cautionary tales (David 1971; Cranstone 1971),
joint by a similar article one year later (Bonnichsen 1972).

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to interpret the ‘archaeological’ plan of a Fulani village in terms of household
reconstruction. At the end he gave the true, ethnographic version of the site and
its occupants, his paper being meant to ‘illustrate the errors that may arise’ and
to ‘indicate some likely limits of possible reconstruction’ (1971: 125). Likewise,
Bonnichsen interpreted a recently-abandoned Indian campsite and later checked
his conclusions with those of ‘Millie’, one of the former occupants, only to find he
had committed ‘a sequence of errors’: items had been misidentified, false associations had been made, activity areas had been interpreted incorrectly, and relationships between activity areas had been misinterpreted (1972: 286). And Heider
(1967: 63) finally concluded: ‘Reconstruction of prehistoric behavior is not by
any means impossible, but it is terribly difficult. [...] If this Cautionary Tale from
New Guinea has a moral for the archaeologist, it is, “Don’t simplify.” ’
In the second half of the 1960s, the function of ethnography for archaeology
served as a basis for the direct-historical approach (Watson, Hill, Anderson), as a
means for widening the horizon (Gould, Stanislawski, Ucko), as a confirmation
of archaeological ideas (Flannery), as a refutation of archaeological ideas (Clarke,
White and Thomas), and, most importantly as a cautionary tale for archaeological interpretation (Heider, David, Bonnichsen). Despite the variety, these were
all rather minimal options. At no point was it convincingly demonstrated that
ethnography could make a constructive contribution to specific archaeological
interpretations beyond the cases of demonstrable historical continuity. Ascher’s
call for ‘a new analogy’ notwithstanding, such objective was far from being rapidly
realized. This holds even true for Ascher’s own case-studies with the Seri Indians
(1962; 1968) which made not clear how ethnographic information could be successfully applied to archaeology. Put briefly, early ethnoarchaeology was critical
rather than constructive; it taught the Socratic lesson that archaeologists only
knew that they didn’t know. Though scholars were fascinated to study the link
between social practice and material remains, they found out that there was no
single, causal mechanism between the two, let alone a straightforward means of
extrapolating it towards the past. In the highlands of New Guinea, at the campsites in the Rockies, and in ethnographic libraries stacked with descriptions on
mortuary practices, one thing became clear: ‘Don’t simplify.’

Hypothetico-deductive reasoning or the benefits of testing
If in the context of the emergent New Archaeology the enthusiasm for ethnographic fieldwork was ubiquitous, the avidity for ethnographic analogy was much
more disputed. To understand the minimal role of ethnoarchaeology as a warning finger requires a closer look at the analogy debate of the 1960s. The tension
between ideas put forward by Chang and the ensuing critical reaction of Binford
are especially revealing.
In a paper published in Current Anthropology in 1967, the Chinese-American
scholar K.C. Chang drew attention to the ‘major aspects of the interrelationship of
archaeology and ethnology’, as his title read. Predictably, one of these concerned
the issue of analogy. Chang held that ‘analogy is the principal theoretical apparatus by which an archaeologist benefits from ethnological knowledge’ (1967: 229).

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In his view, analogy was the ‘cornerstone’ of archaeological reconstruction.
Following the ideas of Thompson and Ascher who had accorded a central role to
analogy in archaeological inference, he argued that ‘in a broad sense, archaeological reconstruction is analogy’ (230, original italics). Chang applauded Ascher’s call
for a new ethnographic analogy and wrote: ‘No archaeologist is worth his salt, it
can almost be said, unless he makes an analogy or two in every monograph he
writes’ (229).
As the paper was published as a discussion article in Current Anthropology, it
was obvious that Binford who had, after all, written on the relationship of archaeology and anthropology, would say a few words. Binford disagreed with Chang
on nearly all levels. The aim of archaeology was not reconstruction, he repeated,
but explanation of cultural differences and similarities. Analogy was not the best
device to make such interpretation, but a highly contentious form of reasoning:
‘Even if we were to admit that archaeological arguments always include an analogical component (and I am not convinced of this), this does not make these arguments analogies’ (Binford in Chang 1976: 235). Sure, an ethnographically known
context might suggest a behavioural correlate for an archaeological problem but
‘recourse to ethnography could never render such an argument probable or true’
(236). Unlike Thompson, Ascher and Chang, Binford did not believe that the
solution for archaeological inferences was to be sought in the ethnographic field
itself. His position echoed that of Childe and G. Clark: analogy provided useful
questions but no definite answers; eventually, the archaeological record had to
have the final word. An analogical proposition was all well and good, it was only
through testing against the archaeological evidence that its value was ascertained:
‘The basic form of archaeological argument [...] should be logico-deductive. From
a set of premises, we can frame testable hypotheses whose confirmation will lend
support to the postulates and assumptions (premises) on which the hypotheses are
based’ (235), he wrote in response to Chang.
The importance Binford attached to this aspect of testing cannot be overestimated. As a consequence of his readings in Hempel’s positivist philosophy of science, he embraced the idea of a hypothetico-deductive logic whereby scientific evidence leads to hypotheses, hypotheses to testable deductions, deductions to tests,
and tests to confirmations or refutations of the initial hypotheses. Collingwood’s
hermeneutic which filtered through in the historically inspired archaeology of the
1950s had to make place for Hempel’s positivism. Empathic ideas were meaningless, unless they were logically validated (cf. Binford 1983a: 21). This set of
arguments came up in all of Binford’s publications published in the late 1960s
(Binford 1967; 1968a; 1968b). At the Man the Hunter conference, he said: ‘It is
only through the testing of hypotheses logically related to a series of theoretical
propositions that we can increase or decrease the explanatory value of our propositions’ (1968a: 269). In the introduction of the influential volume New Perspectives
in Archaeology he demanded for ‘rigorous testing of deductively drawn hypotheses
against independent sets of data’ (1968b: 86).

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As in all positivist philosophies of science, a sharp distinction was drawn between the context of discovery and the context of justification. Hypothesis formulation, where analogy played its role, belonged to the first of these; hypothesis
testing to the second. Whereas the context of discovery entailed the fortuitous
and accidental process of scientific practice (a domain more important to the historian of science than to the practising scientist per se), it was only in the context
of justification that science gained its logical credibility through rigorous testing.
Analogy thus belonged to the less important stage of hypothesis formulation, a
place where it could not affect the sound procedures of hypothesis verification.
Binford said:
The crucial point, however, is that our understanding of the past is not simply a
matter of interpreting the archeological record by analogy to living societies as has
been commonly asserted (cf. Thompson 1956, p. 329). Our knowledge is sound
to the degree that we can verify our postulates scientifically, regardless of the source
of their inspiration. (Binford 1968a: 269)

‘Regardless of the source of their inspiration’: even if Binford applauded the recent growth in ethnoarchaeological research, he maintained that ‘refinements in
data collection and increased ethnographic knowledge cannot by themselves increase our knowledge of the past’ (1968b: 86). This explains why Binford himself,
at least at this point of his intellectual development, did not start to undertake
ethnographic fieldwork like so many others. Analogy, imagination, conjecture,
and empathy were acknowledged as interesting devices for gaining new ideas, yet
‘a consciously deductive philosophy’ went further and undertook ‘the verification of propositions through hypothesis testing’ (1968b: 90-1). As a consequence,
Binford concluded: ‘the archaeologist is in no way dependent upon the ethnologist’ (1968a: 269).
The most elaborate example of Binford’s alternative reasoning was to be found
in his famous article on ‘Smudge pits and hide smoking’ (1967) where he tried
to interpret the presence of certain features he had excavated in Illinois; they
concerned small pits filled with charred corncobs at the edge of native American
settlements. In essence, Binford invoked analogical reasoning for the solution of a
classical problem, i.e. the functional interpretation of an enigmatic find category.
In this, he did not differ from seventeenth-century antiquarians who used ethnology to explain the so-called thunderbolts as tools. He did, however, differ from
them in his insistence that the ethnographic suggestion should be thoroughly tested against the archaeological record. Based on a survey of ethnohistorical sources,
he postulated that the smudge pits must have been used during the smoking of
animal hides. He then proceeded to derive a number of testable hypotheses from
this postulate. And although he failed to perform the actual tests themselves (a
painful omission which became apparent later), he concluded that the procedure
discussed was ‘appropriate in the context of a positivistic philosophy of anthropology and archaeology’ as ‘the final judgement of the archaeological reconstruction presented here must rest with testing through subsidiary hypotheses drawn
deductively’ (1967: 48-9).

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The Chang-Binford debate was not an isolated dispute between two NorthAmerican archaeologists but was framed by the much larger question in anthropology as to whether modern hunter-gatherers could be used as models for prehistory. This entailed nothing less than a renaissance of the nineteenth-century
debate on the position of contemporary savagery. The neo-evolutionist Elman
Service contented that there was much to be gained from a study of ‘our contemporary ancestors’ (1962: 8). Even if he admitted that ‘primitive’ societies were
affected by contact with the industrialized word, he still could write that ‘anthropology possesses a time machine’ (8). For Leslie Freeman (1968) this could not be
permitted: societies of modern hunter-gatherers were too much the result of complex historical processes. Repeating the argument made by the Duke of Argyll a
century earlier, he noticed that the spread of agriculture had forced historical and
contemporary foragers into marginal zones so that they were ‘totally unrepresentative of the sorts of hunting-gathering adaptations that existed before the advent of
food production’ (1968: 264). He further stressed that there were ‘logical limits to
prediction from a limited sample’: not all of human prehistory could be deduced
from the few remaining forager societies today. Amount of immediate similarity,
therefore, was no criterion to justify the use of analogy:
The use of assumed similarities with modern behavior in the explanation of
the behavior of extinct groups is not only fallacious, it is also deleterious to research since it prevents the discovery that the postulated similarities do not exist.
(Freeman 1968: 265)

Whereas Freeman eschewed the use of any form of analogy, others tried to limit its
impact by calling, like Binford had suggested, for independent testing of the analogical propositions against the archaeological record. For example, Hill (1968)
interpreted a thirteenth-century pueblo in Arizona by analogy with contemporary
Hopi and Zuñi architecture but sought to validate his propositions through systematic archaeological confirmation. His approach was soon staged as an exemplary case of hypothetico-deductive reasoning so typical for the New Archaeology.
In their influential volume Explanation in Archeology: An Explicitly Scientific
Approach, Watson, LeBlanc and Redman applauded it by rejecting the taken-forgranted distinction between a direct-historical and a general-comparative analogy:
‘The logical framework for application of both kinds of analogy remains exactly
the same: regardless of their source [...] the proposed analogies are simply hypotheses. As such they must be tested against independent archaeological data’ (Watson,
LeBlanc and Redman 1971: 50-1). In contrast to Clark and Willey’s opinion,
the direct-historical approach was thus no longer the superior form of analogy.
Elsewhere, Watson stated: ‘Logically speaking, it does not matter where these interpretative hypotheses come from; what matters is how they stand up when tested
against the archaeological record’ (1979a: 277). David Clarke, too, endorsed this
opinion. In Analytical Archaeology the role of ethnographic analogy was limited
to critical examination of theory; yet in Models in Prehistory he spent considerable attention to ‘the morass of debate about the proper and improper use of historical and ethnographic “parallels” in archaeological interpretation’ (1972b: 40).

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Regarding ethnographic analogies as a specific form of model-building, he said
that they may ‘generate potential models’ but that ‘only archaeology can test their
applicability in a given archaeological context’ (41). Like Binford, he did not
bother whether the hypotheses were ‘imagined, deduced or dreamed by the archaeologist’, whether they came from ‘historic-ethnographic analogy’ or ‘from
movements of molecules in a gas, the mutual adjustments of magnets floating in
a bath, or the boundary patterns of bubbles in a soap film’; the only important
aspect was that they ‘be tested against the archaeological record’ (41, 42).
Whereas Ascher and Ucko had still considered ‘closeness of fit’ (i.e. the amount
of formal similarity) as the decisive yardstick for the analogy’s success, the testing programme inaugurated by Binford, Watson and Clarke enabled to reduce
the amount of similarity to a secondary place in the evaluation. ‘Goodness of
fit is not enough,’ David Clarke exclaimed (1972b: 41). Source and target did
no longer need to be as close as possible; a certain distance was permitted now
that testing independently verified, validated or refuted the analogical hypothesis.
Consequently, the source analogue was not necessarily required to show historical
continuity with the archaeological target (as Watson argued), it could even come
from remote fields like the physical sciences (as Clarke argued). If only rigorous
testing was performed, almost anything could be a potential source of inspiration,
the New Archaeologists optimistically reasoned.

Between critique and inspiration
In the 1960s, a young generation of American archaeologists sought to align themselves much more closely with anthropology. In articles with titles like ‘Archaeology
as anthropology’ and ‘Major aspects of the interrelationship of archaeology and
ethnology’, they strove to benefit from neo-evolutionist and adaptationist ideas
then en vogue in anthropology. Simultaneously, several archaeologists started to
explore the ethnographic field to extract data relevant to a set of inquiries uncovered by traditional ethnographers. Ethnoarchaeology was born and the link
between cultural behaviour and material residue became its prime focus of attention. Inevitably, this led to a discussion on the role of ethnographic analogy
in archaeological inference. Whereas most scholars believed that much was to be
learned from a more intimate understanding of processes occurring in the present,
none really used evidence on contemporary non-industrialized societies as a basis
for archaeological inference beyond the confines of the traditional direct-historical approach. The role of analogy was limited to a critical function (most notably
in the format of cautionary tales) or to an inspirational function (in the formulation of hypotheses). While the former suggested how little we actually knew, the
latter indicated how much we could possibly know. Yet despite this diversity, both
strategies were fundamentally similar in that they sought to circumvent the thorny
issue of analogy. Authors who presented a cautionary tale avoided the use of analogy and withdrew from making any definite or constructive statements about the
past. Authors who relegated analogy to the realm of mere inspiration, eliminated
it from the context of verification (Wylie 1985: 85-8). Analogy thus belonged to
the more trivial context of discovery. As hypothesis-testing was thought to be the

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decisive moment in archaeological reasoning, it did not even matter where the hypothesis initially came from. The danger of induction which any analogy implies,
was thus eliminated by a trust in hypothetico-deductive logic.
The consequence of such logic is that analogies are not assessed on the basis
of their internal validity but on the truth of their conclusions. Put simply, if you
test an analogy, you don’t care to improve its structure—you’re only interested in
its content. Although a number of archaeologists started to draw upon the work
on analogy by contemporary logicians, the latters’ procedures for strengthening
the validity of the analogies were often mentioned but neglected at the same time.
Binford, for instance, drew upon the work of the logician Stebbing and referred
to the criteria of ‘relevance’ and ‘weight of the conclusion’ (although he used different names), yet he continued:
In the examination of anthropological arguments from analogy, we are not concerned with the criteria which will allow us to judge the form of a particular
argument from analogy as in the previous discussion [on Stebbing]. Instead, we
are concerned with the content of the argument. (Binford 1967: 35, original
emphases)

By the same token, Nicolas Peterson (1971) enumerated in an edited volume
on aboriginal Australia Copi’s six criteria for assessing the strength of an analogical argument. It was one of the first elaborate references to the logic of analogy
proper but, like Binford, he refrained from putting these suggestions into practice.
Clarke, too, had an incipient interest in the logic of analogies when he said that
the book on ‘the valid procedures for using these models’ was ‘yet to be written’
(1972b: 40) but finally contended with testing as the appropriate solution.
The New Archaeologists were aware of the problems of analogical reasoning
but had not yet found a solution to outstrip the single-minded reliance on similarity of the Victorian evolutionists and mid-century humanist archaeologists. In
the absence of such improved logic, critical warning and external testing were the
two tentative way outs. Though certainly overstating the point, Bryony Orme’s
words from 1973 contain a grain of truth for the period she wrote in: ‘I would
even claim that, allowing for cultural differences, the use made of ethnography has
not changed since the early modern period, let alone since the heyday of the 19th
century’ (1973: 487). The next decade, however, would bring about fundamental
changes—particularly because the scholar who had been the staunchest defender
of analogy-testing started to doubt.

The heyday of ethnoarchaeology
Throughout the 1970s and well into 80s, ethnoarchaeology thrived as it had never
before. What had once been a relatively minor branch of the New Archaeology
restricted to critical and inspirational purposes soon developed into one of the

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largest fields of ‘processual archaeology’ (as the New Archaeology increasingly
started to be called after it was no longer new). Many North-American archaeologists began to undertake ethnographic fieldwork, not only in the planet’s remotest
areas where the last hunter-gatherers tried to eke a living out of their marginal
ecological conditions, but also closer at hand in certain segments of the Western
world like supermarkets, camping grounds and car graveyards. More than a dozen
monographs and edited volumes appeared; archaeological and anthropological
journals incessantly published articles on contemporary living contexts; and generations of undergraduates were exposed to the latest insights on the theme. But
more than this quantitative growth (which could be explained by the remarkable
increase in professional archaeologists and students after the 1960s), there was
also substantial qualitative change. Theoretical issues were high on the agenda; the
discussion on analogy continued with arguments which had never been brought
up before; and logic was drawn in to improve the format of reasoning. Whereas
some other fields of processual thought, like the debate on style, constantly run
into conceptual boundaries, the discussion on analogy was refined over the course
of nearly fifteen years. This is not to say that there was unambiguous progress or
that perfection was reached; only that the use of ethnography in archaeology had
moved into a rich, complex, and multifarious stage of its history.
What must be held responsible for this popularity? It would be fallacious to
uncritically link the successes of ethnoarchaeology to the work undertaken in
the 1960s. Although someone like Gould simply continued and expanded the
research he had done earlier, for Binford there were fundamental problems with
the testing dogma as it had gained widespread acceptance, partly under his instigation. To understand ethnoarchaeology in the 1970s requires first to understand
Binford’s change of opinion.

The impossibility of independent testing
Two years after Binford’s smudge pits article, American Antiquity published a contribution by Patrick Munson (1969) which questioned the validity of Binford’s
interpretation of these features as hide-smoking devices. From a number of ethnohistorical documents, Munson suggested ‘also on the basis of analogy’ (83) that
the smudge pits might be better interpreted in the context of smoking ceramics: pottery would thus have been put over the pits in order to have the interior
blackened. Binford wrote a reply but American Antiquity refused to print it as the
editor thought it did not add to the discussion. The paper eventually appeared in
Binford’s first collection of articles (Binford 1972b) and attentive reading shows
that it was far more than a stubborn attempt to be proven right.12 Even if Binford
rebutted Munson’s critique by showing that ethnohistorical sources on potterysmoking were inadequate—the best example dated from a postcontact moment
whereby pottery was smoked inside a European style house—he did not entirely
12 American Antiquity’s refusal to publish the reply made Binford drop his subscription to the journal
and thus his membership of the Society of American Archaeologists, the prime professional organization of archaeologists in North-America, for almost a decade (Binford 1983b: 19)

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reject the alternative: ‘The accuracy of a proposition can only be determined by
the testing of deductively drawn hypotheses against independent data, something
which has not been done thus far for either proposition’ (1972b: 56). Hide-smoking or pottery-smoking, Binford thus admitted that ‘neither proposition has been
tested’ (53). The adequate testing of a proposition seemed far more difficult than
originally acknowledged. Prior to such testing, however, Binford suggested that
‘the relative merit of different arguments from analogy’ be assessed ‘on the basis
of the internal logic and strength of competing arguments’ (53). Instead of external verification of an analogical proposition, it was worthwhile to check in the
meantime its internal validity because ‘an argument may be logically valid but at
the same time false’ (52). He regarded Munson’s alternative as logically valid, but
reasoned on the basis of available ethnohistoric evidence that it was empirically
less likely. His conclusion is worth quoting in full:
The argument presented here is that the presence of a valid alternative proposition based on ethnographic analogy is not sufficient to refute an equally valid but
different proposition. A valid proposition can only be refuted through hypothesis
testing. However, when faced with valid alternatives, one can evaluate in probabilistic terms the relative strength of alternatives and make decisions as to how to
invest research time in hypothesis testing. (Binford 1972b: 57)

Although Binford still supported independent testing as the ultimate criterion in
hypothesis-evaluation, he never undertook such verification himself, even when
confronted with a radical alternative. This reluctance was telling of the intrinsic
difficulties testing implied: the archaeological record seemed a poor arbiter to decide between two available options. In fact, Binford had to rely on ethnohistoric
rather than archaeological evidence to evaluate Munson’s proposition. Whereas
Munson’s article could have been easily eliminated on the basis of these sources,
to Binford it ‘pointed to even further problems with the use of arguments of analogy’ (1983b: 19). Even if he still regarded the hide-smoking interpretation as ‘one
of the strongest arguments from analogy I have ever seen in archaeology’ (1983b:
8), in retrospect, he said he was ‘fascinated’ by Munson’s alternative: ‘His work
appeared to me to be just the type of constructive exploration into our problems
of inference that would move us toward a better understanding of our methods’
(1983b: 19). It had revealed two important insights: primo, the difficulty of testing the analogy’s empirical content, secundo, the necessity of strengthening the
internal logic.
Similar doubts about the value of independent testing had emerged within the
context of another and much more famous debate Binford was involved with in
the late 1960s, i.e. the Mousterian debate. In opposition to François Bordes, the
dean of European Palaeolithic archaeology who regarded the distinct Mousterian
facies in south-west France as representing different ethnic entities, Binford argued that they reflected different sorts of functional activities. The Mousterian
debate was hailed as the first triumph of American processual archaeology over
European culture-historical archaeology, but Binford himself became far less convinced of any successes booked. The Mousterian debate, he recalled, was not so

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much a step forward in European Palaeolithic archaeology but ‘the key test case
for learning about the limitations of our methodologies’ (1983b: 66). Armed with
the newest statistical techniques and a pile of punch cards, he and his wife Sally
Binford had set out to the Dordogne in 1968 to study the assemblage variation
and faunal associations of Mousterian levels from Combe Grenal. Yet what had
come up was ‘an absolute profusion of new facts’ (1983b: 66) as well as a sense
of ‘total frustration’ (in Sabloff 1998: 18). Binford has extensively written about
this phase of his intellectual career and while there is a danger of historical distortion in using such retrospective statements, his own posterior reflections are often
more illuminating and honest than the brash polemics he wrote in the 1960s.
‘True to the beliefs of the times we thought we could test our ideas against the
archaeological record at the Mousterian sites,’ he wrote in 1983, but despite all
the new data he rapidly came to the conclusion that ‘we had no Rosetta stone, no
way of translating the wealth of patterns into meaningful statements about past
conditions[...]. The important step of “testing” had not been performed [...] our
interpretative principles were inadequate’ (1983b: 66, 67).
Binford’s student James Hill, too, had tried to test the ethnographic predictions about the function of rooms in the famous Broken K Pueblo in Arizona but
started to realize that such ‘independent tests’ actually came down to standard
archaeological arguments for functional interpretation. ‘What neither of us faced
squarely at the time,’ Binford (1983b: 12) wrote, ‘was that we could not use the
archaeological record to test the accuracy of meanings assigned to archaeological
facts by these tactics.’ Throughout the 1960s, Binford and his students had assumed that the archaeological record could serve as the independent arbiter for
inferential propositions. Now he started to realize that this was not the case, that
the archaeological record consisted of mute statics, that it was contemporary, that
our observations on the past were observations in the present, and that the idea of
independent testing suffered from a latent incongruity: ‘If one is testing an interpretative principle linking static residues to causal or conditioning dynamics, one
cannot test such a hypothesis against archaeological data where only static material exists empirically’ (Binford 1983b: 14). In a more succinct version, this contradiction became: ‘one cannot readily test an argument relating statics to dynamics when all one has are static facts’ (15). All so-called independent tests remained
therefore ‘intuitive, impressionistic, and unevaluated’ (17).
The very moment Binford realized that ‘the problem of testing seemed particularly sticky for archaeologists’ (1983b: 12), a second-generation of New
Archaeologists came up with a form of positivist logic which was much more
extreme than anything that came before. Authors like Fritz and Plog (1970) and
Watson, LeBlanc and Redman (1971) urged that the hypothetico-deductive form
of reasoning be expanded to a strict deductive-nomological approach: hypothesistesting was not enough, it had to entail law-building as well. Borrowing the covering-law model of explanation from positivist philosophers like Nagel, Hempel
and Oppenheim, they insisted that hypothesis-testing in archaeological explanation required the formulation, confirmation and utilization of general laws. A
particular archaeological phenomenon was only duly accounted for if and only if

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it could be subsumed under a general, covering law; if this was not the case, the
interpretation had to be rejected as unscientific. Testing thus became an integral
part of a broader, ‘explicitly scientific’, nomological approach: ‘One distinctive
feature of scientific archeology is a self-conscious concern with the formulation
and testing of hypothetical general laws,’ was the call to arms with which the book
by Watson c.s. opened (1971: 3). However, many contemporaries found that there
were severe problems with this programme. One year after its publication in an
important but somehow forgotten paper published in World Archaeology (1972),
the logician Morgan mercilessly exposed its selective borrowings, logical inconsistencies, rhetorical verbiage and outright sloganeering. Most importantly, he
said that the examples cited did not confirm to the covering-law model but were
in fact nothing more than disguised inductive-statistical arguments. Binford, too,
regarded this ‘overemphasis on method or logic’ as ‘a return to an inductive strategy’ (1977: 6). According to him, there was nothing wrong with empirical generalizations but these did not result in general laws; they were simply inductively
arrived at empirical laws and as such insufficient for theory-building (Binford
1978a). Despite Binford’s initial positivism, the notion of ‘law’ had always been
of minor importance to him: ‘I do not believe laws of relevance to explanation can
be discovered and evaluated through inductive arguments, nor do I presume that
confirmation is “contained within the framework of the covering-law model of
explanation”,’ he wrote in response to some of the hyperpositivist proponents of
the deductive-nomological approach (1978a: 42). He, therefore, found the work
of Fritz and Plog ‘most misleading’, and that of Watson, LeBlanc and Redman
‘very frustrating’, in particular because these were increasingly cited as the epistemological foundations of processual archaeology (1983b: 14, 15).
In the wake of Binford’s criticism, several scholars accepted the impossibility
of independent testing. !Kung ethnoarchaeologist John Yellen agreed that ‘deductive proof—in the strictest sense of the term—is difficult to obtain’; he thus
denounced the ‘explicitly scientific approach to archaeology’ with its ‘unfounded
optimism and undeniable arrogance’ (1977: 2, 12, original italics). Daniel Stiles
admitted that in practice an archaeological ‘test’—the word was always put between inverted commas in his writing—simply came down to ‘the degree of similarity’ and ‘the goodness of fit’ between source and target analogues (1977: 96, 97).
Testing thus fell back upon the very inductive criterion it had tried to escape, that
is, that of enumerating similarity. Even an ‘explicitly scientific archaeologist’ like
Patty Jo Watson had to make a compromise: ‘logically it does not matter [where
the analogy came from], but—as is so often the case—practically it does matter’; the most suitable sources were still to be found in ‘settings as much like the
prehistoric ones as possible’, preferably there where ‘cultural continuity is great’
(1979a: 277, 278). Grahame Clark must have nodded approvingly. Similarity
slipped in by the back door: whereas Watson had once rejected the distinction
between the direct-historical and the general-comparative approach, the former
was now admitted to be the more productive one as it showed greater resemblance
between source and target. Indeed, she wrote that the immersion in an ethnographic situation that paralleled the prehistoric context could be ‘so overwhelming

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that at times it verges on a mystical experience’ (1979a: 278)—curious language
for someone who had proclaimed an explicitly scientific archaeology.
From the 1980s onwards, the pessimism on testing turned into a full-blown
critique. Hodder (1982a: 21), for instance, argued that the archaeological confirmation of test implications consisted of nothing more than simply adding further
similarities to the ones which had already been established at the beginning of
the analogy. Wylie (1985) demonstrated that the hypothetico-deductive method
of testing propositions could never escape a dependence an inductive arguments.
Likewise, Stoczkowski (1992) showed that for the formulation of useful test implications, archaeologists had to make a second recourse to analogy. It was impossible to directly confront the testable hypothesis with the archaeological record
without relying on inductive assumptions about the relationship between statics
and dynamics. The criterion of independent testing was thus shown to be a myth
born out of an exaggerated positivist avidity.
‘We cannot prove anything positively,’ Binford came to believe (1977: 3).
Rather, the major challenge which archaeologists faced was ‘not testing laws [...]
but instead justifying the linkage of a causal dynamic [...] to the facts used in
reconstructing the past’ (1983b: 16). According to him, the only way out of the
impasse created by the impossibility of testing was to ‘study situations where organized dynamics were taking place and where patterned statics were a natural
byproduct of the dynamics’ (1983b: 68). This was Binford’s somewhat convoluted call to do ethnoarchaeology, i.e. to study the causal relationships between
cultural behaviour and material residue, to develop a middle-range theory which
would like a Rosetta stone ‘permit the accurate conversion from observation on
statics to statement about dynamics’ (1981: 25). Half a decade later than many of
the other New Archaeologists, Binford was convinced that much could be gained
from a study of contemporary non-industrial societies. Not so much because this
enhanced our understanding of the past, but because it enhanced the understanding of our understanding of the past. It was quite literally an exercise in ‘learning
how to learn’ (Binford 1983b). From 1969 to 1973, Binford spent several seasons
with the Nunamiut in northern central Alaska, one of the last predominantly
hunting societies in the world; it was followed by a shorter stay with the Alyawara,
a tribe of Australian aborigines, in 1974. If the New Archaeology was to be more
than ‘an antitraditional archaeology at best’, more than ‘an anarchy of uncertainty,
optimism, and products of extremely variable quality’, students of the past had
to seriously investigate how inferences were drawn in the present (Binford 1977:
9). The rebellion could not continue ‘for rebellion’s sake’; what was to be done
next was ‘the difficult task of theory building and methodological development’
(9, 10). The result of these important fieldwork studies appeared during the late
1970s and will be discussed further on.
Yet the idea of studying the present as a place where statics and dynamics could
be simultaneously observed provided the justification for most, if not all, ethnoarchaeology at the time. Yellen went so far as to speak about a ‘laboratory approach’ (1977: 11) where direct observation of an ongoing society could be correlated to its material by-products. Kramer wrote that the task of ethnoarchaeology

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was ‘to systematically define the relationships between behavior and material culture’ (1979: 1); Stiles focused on ‘the imprint that this behaviour will leave on the
physical world’ (1977: 91); and Longacre sought to discern ‘material correlates of
patterns of human organization and behavior’ (1978: 362). Ethnoarchaeology was
no longer a quest for parallels, but a study of processes.

A thriving subdiscipline
In the second half of the 1970s, many university libraries must have spent fortunes in keeping up with all the publications which explored the interface between archaeology and ethnography. The period between 1974 and 1982 saw
the appearance of a series of books with titles like Ethnoarchaeology (Donnan and
Clewlow 1974), Archaeology and Anthropology: Areas of Mutual Interest (Spriggs
1977), Archaeological Approaches to the Present: Models for Reconstructing the Past
(Yellen 1977), Explorations in Ethnoarchaeology (Gould 1978a), Living Archaeology
(Gould 1980), Ethnoarchaeology: Implications of Ethnography for Archaeology
(Kramer 1979), Anthropology for Archaeologists (Orme 1981), Ethnography by
Archaeologists (Tooker 1982) and The Present Past: An Introduction to Anthropology
for Archaeologists (Hodder 1982a). Even if this list of variations on a theme is far
from being exhaustive (it leaves out essential publications which appeared as articles), it gives at least an impression of ethnoarchaeology’s popularity at the time.
Ethnoarchaeology, it seems, was not just a finicky debate conducted in scientific
journals, but a profitable branch of social science for publishers.13 A questionnaire
among practising North-American archaeologists in 1977 revealed that from the
137 current methodological and theoretical research frontiers and issues mentioned by the respondents, ‘ethnoarchaeology’ ranked third in importance (on the
first and second place stood ‘the need to develop better models for understanding
the processes of cultural evolution’ and ‘the use and abuse of quantitative methods’; Schiffer 1977). In the same year, Stiles’ state of the art in ethnoarchaeology
optimistically claimed that the field had overcome ‘many of its growing pains’
(1977: 87). In 1982, the first issue of the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
appeared with Bob Whallon as editor, one of Binford’s first students. True to its
title, the archaeological and anthropological study of ‘contemporary, living human groups’ was listed as one of the main targets in the editorial introduction
(Whallon 1982: 2). The very first paper was a contribution by Binford on the
organization of place among the Nunamiut.
Some general lines and tendencies can be discerned in this rapidly expanding field of ethnoarchaeology. First, there was the work on traditional rural settlements in the Near East which continued Patty Jo Watson’s seminal study in
Iran. Watson’s own Archaeological Ethnography in Western Iran (1979b) and Carol
Kramer’s Village Ethnoarchaeology: Rural Iran in Archaeological Perspective (1982),
13 The wealth of book-length treatments of ethnoarchaeology in terms of monographs and edited
volumes echoed the nineteenth-century importance of books as the prime format for scientific communication. Whereas journal articles played an equally crucial role, few subfields in processual
archaeology produced as many volumes as ethnoarchaeology did.

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as well as Frank Hole’s work in Luristan belonged to that tradition. For obvious
reasons, the dominant perspective in such studies was a direct-historical approach
which relied on the assumed continuity between prehistoric past and Islamic
present. Next, there was the ceramic ethnoarchaeology of scholars working in
the American Midwest where individuals like Hill, Longacre, Stanislawski, and
Deetz were involved. They walked in the footsteps of the 1960s research Hill and
Longacre had been doing as graduate students under Lewis Binford. In a very
general sense, the basic question was how traditional anthropological concepts
like matrilocal residence, sexual division of labour, and particular kinship systems
could be unravelled on the basis of ceramic associations with architectural units in
the archaeological record. This sort of work was exported to the Philippines where
Longacre inaugurated his Kalinga project in 1973.
Yet the domain where ethnoarchaeology was most active and innovative concerned the study of contemporary hunter-gatherers. This was largely the consequence of the Man the Hunter conference which had canonized the image of a
universal hunting-gathering way of life and at same time indicated that the last
representatives of it were rapidly disappearing. J. Desmond Clark, for example,
emphasized at the Chicago meeting ‘the urgent need for “ethnoarcheological”
studies of such extant “Stone Age” groups while they still exist’ (Clark 1968: 278)
and he was the one who stimulated Lee to work on the !Kung. Since the available
ethnographic work on hunter-gatherers was considered inappropriate for archaeological purposes (cf. Wobst 1978), archaeologists started to assemble their own
data. There was not a moment to loose if one wanted to observe a nearly extinct
lifestyle which had once been the quintessential human adaptation. Foraging societies being restricted to fairly marginal ecological zones, the emphasis was inevitably on fieldwork in the arctic and the tropics. In the first half of the 1970s, several
scholars undertook ethnoarchaeological campaigns among contemporary foraging
societies. Binford’s work with the Nunamiut in central Alaska, Yellen’s study of
the !Kung San in the Kalahari desert of Botswana, and Gould’s research with the
Ngatatjara in the Western Desert in Australia all attempted to document what was
seen as a quickly vanishing way of life. The first such substantial study to appear
was John Yellen’s ethnoarchaeology of !Kung in the Dobe region of Botswana, a
study which was prompted by Richard Lee’s cultural ecology of that region. Yellen
focused on the patterns of !Kung settlements and sites, while simultaneously providing the reader with several detailed maps and raw data of this vanishing society of foragers. The book was hailed by Longacre as ‘the best report of recent
ethnoarchaeological research that I have seen’ (1978: 359) and by Binford as ‘the
most detailed ethnoarchaeological study yet to appear’ (1978c: 319). Meanwhile,
Binford himself published several important articles on the Nunamiut organization of space, both at the local and regional level (1978c; 1980). These were
flanked by two book-length treatments on ‘faunal ethnoarchaeology’: Nunamiut
Ethnoarchaeology (1978b) which focused on the formation of bone assemblages in
a hunting society and Bones: Ancient Men and Modern Myths (1981) which emphasized the extent of bone modification by human and nonhuman agents. He
thus brought into ethnoarchaeology the theme of faunal analysis which he had

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already been working on during the Mousterian debate. Very close to the Bones
book was a work by C.K. Brain on early hominid remains in South-African cave
sites: The Hunters or the Hunted (1981) which had also made of use actualistic,
present-day studies of animal bone modification. Both books argued in fact that
much patterning in faunal assemblages had been too eagerly interpreted in terms
of hominid activities, so that effects of nonhuman agents like leopards, hyenas
and porcupines had been underestimated. Whereas Brain attacked the osteodontokeratic culture Dart had defended for very early hominid cave sites in South
Africa, Binford focused mostly on the home-base hypothesis which Isaac had cast
as interpretations for the East-African living-floors. The unusual absence of certain anatomical parts in faunal assemblages was not necessarily the result of cultural selection but could be explained by differential body part preservation and
carnivorous dietary preference.14 Furthermore, so-called cut marks very often appeared to be simple gnawing marks induced by carnivorous animals rather than
intrepid hunters. Ethnoarchaeology of hunter-gatherer thus evolved seamlessly
into the study of archaeological formation processes (Brain used the older name
‘taphonomy’) supported by ethology.
The study of natural and cultural formation processes affecting the archaeological record also formed the core of the work undertaken by Michael Schiffer
(1976; 1987). Although ethnoarchaeology only played a secondary role in it, it
often focused on the observation of processes between dynamics and statics in the
present. It was only in a contemporary setting that the transformation from a systemic context to an archaeological context could be adequately followed. This was
also the underlying rationale for the growing field of experimental archaeology:
controlled experiments in the present allowed to disentangle the multiple variables responsible for producing certain known archaeological results. Although
the approach was not new (flintknapping experimentation had been undertaken
earlier in the twentieth century by Semenov in Russia, Bordes in France, and
Crabtree in the United States), it received a renewed boost of attention with a
number of large-scale experimental projects and general books (Ingersoll, Yellen
and Macdonald 1977; Coles 1973; 1979). A final realm closely associated with
to ethnoarchaeology was the incipient domain of modern material culture studies. Originally started for educational purposes, the study of material culture in
present-day North-America was soon thought to elucidate the more general issue
of formation processes and the relation between behavioural dynamics and material
statics. Ascher (1968) had already turned to automobile graveyards in the 1960s,
but the most important proponents of this approach became Michael Schiffer and
particularly William Rathje whose Garbage Project in Tucson, Arizona went on
for many years (Gould and Schiffer 1981; Rathje 1981). The study of formation
14 The idea that the differential body part representation in South-African cave sites resulted from
carnivorous activities was first hinted at by Sherwood Washburn in the 1950s. Having attended the
1955 Pan-African Congress in Livingstone where Raymond Dart expounded the arguments for his
osteodontokeratic culture, Washburn decided to study the bone modification by carnivores in the
savannah today. He came to the conclusion that Australopithecines rather than successful hunters
must have regularly been the victim of feline carnivores (Washburn 1957).

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processes, experimental archaeology and modern material culture studies were related processual subfields which had all sprung from ethnoarchaeology’s wish to
understand the link between living context and resulting remains.
Ethnoarchaeology then was one of the most ramified fields during the heyday
of processual archaeology. In fact, it touched upon nearly all themes of archaeological inquiry: early human origins, later Palaeolithic adaptations, origins of food
production, Neolithic villages, protohistorical and early-historical settlements, urbanization and modernity. It stretched from the Australian desert to the Arizonan
refuse dumps, and from the Alaskan cold to the Kalahari heat. It involved the very
basic methodological issue of formation processes and the quintessential theoretical problem of how one went about from remains to reconstruction. It would go
too far to say processual archaeology was ethnoarchaeology; but it is certainly true
that without ethnoarchaeology there would not have been processual archaeology
as we know it. Nevertheless, the central question remained: What did it all lead
up to? How could the present still be used to understand the past after testing had
been discredited?

Beyond analogy?
The ethnoarchaeological boom of the 1970s did not just bring about an intensification of an earlier interest in ethnography, but a fundamental reformulation
of its purposes and objectives. Its inspirational function lost credibility now that
there was no longer an independent means of verifying the source of inspiration.
Its critical function, too, was no longer believed to be of great value. Several archaeologists were overtly dismissive about the sceptical papers: Longacre said that
‘the “cautionary tales” that often result from this type of impressionistic work are
not what we need’ (1978: 363); Schiffer was ‘becoming rapidly weary of the “cautionary note” format of these presentations’ (1978: 242); and Kramer wanted to
move ‘beyond the rather bleak level of the “cautionary tales” ’ (1979: 6). Yellen
was more subtle: even if such ‘spoiler approach’ was essentially negative in outlook,
he still praised it ‘as a valuable check on archaeological speculation’ (1977: 8).
Nevertheless, he too urged to go beyond this critical role in order to address more
substantial and constructive functions of ethnographic analogy (1977: 6-12).
Claiming that a warning finger was not enough was all well and good, it remained to be seen in practice how one moved beyond the level of mere nit-picking. In the absence of straightforward testing, how could one further improve
the nature of ethnoarchaeological inferences? Throughout the 1970s several solutions were favoured which deserve further discussion. They can be enumerated as
follows:
1. improvement of testing through experimental archaeology and falsification
2. establishment of laws of human behaviour
3. establishment of causal understanding within the source (middle-range
theory)
4. establishment of unambiguous and uniformitarian parameters

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Improving the tests
The most obvious place to start concerned the very nature of testing itself, that
is, it consisted of checking whether the weaknesses of the hypothetico-deductive
approach could be remedied as such. A number of emendations were suggested.
Ruth Tringham, for instance, agreed that the archaeological record was a poor
context for testing an ethnographic hypothesis and suggested that such testing
take place in an experimental setting where variables could be controlled (1978).
In order to see what smudge pits had been used for, it sufficed to smoke hides and
pots over experimental replicas to see which functioned best. The problem with
such experiments was that they indicated the plausibility of certain interpretations but not their probability. In fact, it was already known from ethnohistorical sources that smudge pits could have been used in two different ways so that
experimental archaeology did not unequivocally contribute to a more grounded
functional attribution.
A second way of improving test procedures consisted of moving beyond the
simple confirmation of hypothesized options. It was thought that if a test was
to be truly accurate, it should not just verify the hypothesis but try to refute it.
Stanislawski (1974: 20) admitted that ‘scientific proof is often impossible, and
that disproving inadequate hypotheses is more reliable.’ Murray and Walker asked
for ‘refutability’ as ‘an additional condition for the acceptance of analogical inferences’ (1988: 261). In philosophical terms, the Hempelian hypothesis-confirmation had to make room for Popperian falsificationism: tests did not consist of
enumerating as many confirming instances as possible, but of severely attempting
to find refuting cases of the favoured hypothesis. Only if a hypothesis stood up
against such attacks, could it be said to possess a certain degree of verisimilitude.
The most explicit application of such falsificationist programme in archaeology
occurred in the context of early hominid research in East-Africa, particularly in
the work of Glynn Isaac (Isaac 1984; Blumenschine 1991). Although Isaac cannot
be said to have been an ethnoarchaeologist in the strict sense (he did not undertake ethnoarchaeological fieldwork himself ), his late-1960s interpretation of PlioPleistocene living floors in East-Africa as home bases for early hominid activities
was considerably influenced by Richard Lee’s study of the !Kung Bushmen in the
Kalahari. Half a decade later, forced by Binford, serious doubts started to emerge
about the value of this ethnographic input: ‘Starting in the mid-1970s there has
been a growing recognition that if we were not simply going to do prehistory by
projecting the present into the past, then these interpretations needed rigorous investigation and testing’ (Isaac 1984: 3). Such tests did not consist of seeking confirmation for the home-base model but occurred in ‘a quasi-Popperian approach
that actively attempts to overturn the initially favored hypothesis’ (23). Together
with his students Henry Bunn, Richard Potts and Pat Shipman, Isaac questioned
whether the accumulations of bone and stone débris at sites in Olduvai Gorge and
at Koobi Fora were really the remains of base camps where hunting and gathering
hominids assembled and returned with the catch of the day. The simple co-occurrence of stone and bone at a site was no longer sufficient proof of the model
if there were no clear signs of interaction between both. Clear evidence of cut

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marks (the effects of stone tools on bones) and use wear (the effects of bones on
stone tools) was therefore required to uphold the home-base hypothesis. Although
eventually Isaac believed that his model withstood the tests, falsifying helped to
liberate the model from its ethnographic roots so that it showed how the early hominid way of life ‘may have been very different from recent prehistory and modern times’ (66). Indeed, falsification allowed to move beyond ‘the tyranny of the
ethnographic present’ (Wobst 1978) in order to find prehistoric uniquenesses.
This was also the core idea underlying all of Richard Gould’s publications
at the time (Gould 1978b; 1980: 29-47, 138-141; Gould and Watson 1982).
Despite his pioneering role in ethnoarchaeology, he vehemently opposed a reliance on ethnographic analogy: ‘The use of ethnoarchaeology to discover analogies
to the prehistoric past is downright misleading’ (1980: 29). Instead, he sought to
replace the argument by analogy with what he called ‘the argument by anomaly’.
This consisted of two argumentative phases: first, one had to formulate a prediction about past behaviour on the basis of ethnographic analogy and uniformitarian assumptions; secondly, one had to check the archaeological record for instances which deviated from this predicted observation. Only such ‘constrastive
approach’ (36), Gould argued, enabled the archaeologist to ‘know more about the
past than one already knows about the present’ (32). The argument by anomaly
tried to safeguard the uniqueness of the past from those archaeologists who tried
to subsume all cultural behaviour under general laws and projective analogies.
Gould accepted that uniformitarian explanations of the eco-utilitarian sort should
be formulated first, but urged that cultural idiosyncrasies should be invoked to
explain what was not covered by such laws. Though Gould made use of laws and
analogies, the contrastive approach was meant to liberate archaeology from them.
Gould’s eagerness to move ‘beyond analogy’ (the phrase returns in nearly all his
writings) prevented him from realizing that his approach was still analogical and
simply signified ‘a commitment to a “falsificationist” testing program’ of analogical arguments (Wylie 1982: 383). Indeed, in reviewing the famous Watson-Gould
debate in ethnoarchaeology, Wylie has rightly argued against Gould that ‘an analogy by any other name is just as analogical’ (1982).15 Salmon agreed that replacing
the argument by analogy with one by anomaly was ‘a mere terminological debate’
(1982: 75). What Gould did, in fact, was using analogies to generate hypotheses
and seeking to falsify them by what he called ‘the contrastive approach’, ‘indirect
reasoning’ or ‘the argument by anomaly’. Since he had narrowed the meaning of
analogy down to projective inferences solely based on similarity (an equation, in
fact, which held true for much of the historical usage of ethnographic analogy in
archaeology), his approach which tried to study similarities and differences had to
be given another name—although in the end it came closer to the proper logical
definition of analogy.

15 The reason why I do not deal with this debate as a whole is that it was not really a debate at all.
Watson stated her previous views, Gould reiterated his points, and in the end they agreed to disagree.
Along with Wylie, the reader has to admit it was rather ‘disappointing’ (1982: 385). The ‘debate’ added no surplus value, so I have considered it more productive to discuss both positions separately.

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Establishing laws
If some scholars wanted to improve the testing procedures by invoking experimental archaeology and falsification, others believed that a more fundamental
rethinking of analogy was at stake. According to them, it could no longer suffice
to study the context of verification if there was no attention for the generation of
analogical arguments. Modified forms of testing sought to improve the transfer
from source to target, but it was believed that the target itself, i.e. the relation
between statics and dynamics should first be strengthened. This was where the
attraction of law-building lured: if it could be shown that there were regular, lawlike patterns between behaviour and material residue in the present, then one possessed a strong warrant for analogical inference. The staunchest defence of such
approach was voiced by Michael Schiffer (1978) who blamed ‘the particularist
orientation of ethnoarchaeology’: ‘The majority of studies, perhaps 90 percent,
make no pretensions to general significance and predictably, achieve none’ (239).
This particularism resulted from ‘the Boasian legacy [...] of glorifying the unique
and eschewing the search for regularities’ (239). In contrast, he believed that the
ethnographic present had to be used as ‘a fertile and appropriate laboratory for
acquiring the laws needed to reconstruct the past from archaeological evidence’
(239). Finding general laws in the present was an efficient means to avoid analogy:
it showed that the pattern was so universal that it could do without the specific instance of the source analogue. The pattern observed in the source was then only an
exemplification of a much more general regularity. As a consequence, the amount
of direct similarity between source and target did no longer matter; no special
proximity between the analogue sides was required. Schiffer said:
Thus it should even be possible to derive laws applicable to the Paleolithic from
study of Nacirema behavior [‘Nacirema’ being the well-worn exotic anagram for
American]. For example, some of the principles that apply to nonsedentary social
units, such as hunter-gatherer bands, may be acquired from study of backpackers,
campers, and migrant farm workers. (Schiffer 1978: 240)

The study of modern material culture resulted directly from the confidence that
cross-cultural laws of human behaviour existed and could be found. Schiffer believed that ‘the day cannot be far off when ethnoarchaeology will begin to supply
the steady flow of laws needed’ (247). He, therefore, sent his students ‘among the
Nacirema’ in order to find ‘laws governing manufacture, use, and even discard of
particular artifact classes [and] basic principles relating to the general functioning
of material culture’ (242). For instance, one of them observed how people dealt
with broken clocks and came up with the ‘law’ that ‘as objects increase in size, the
repairman tends to come to the object rather than vice versa’, being an instantiation of the general law that ‘as the mass of an element increases, there will be a
decrease in the functional distance between the use and repair locations’ (245). No
wonder that such ‘laws’ were ridiculed by Flannery as ‘Mickey Mouse laws’—they
were hardly more than empirical generalizations on fairly trivial aspects, in fact so
trivial that no ethnoarchaeological fieldwork was needed to come up with them.

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Next to their banality, a more serious shortcoming of laws in archaeology was that
they were rarely unambiguous. This was pointed out by Wylie (1982: 390): ‘It is
unusual to find, or to be able to establish, a correlation between variables like human behavior and its material remains that is both absolutely necessary and exclusive such that it is possible to reason securely from consequent to antecedent.’ She
further argued that the laws archaeologists claimed to have discovered were in the
first place ‘laws of correlation’ rather than ‘laws of connection’, i.e. they indicated
that certain attributes commonly occurred together (correlation) but provided no
causal explanation of this regularity (causality).16 Such correlations might hold
well across a number of contexts, but did not guarantee universal applicability.
‘Without any basis in an understanding of how these regularities are generated and
why, or under what conditions, they may be expected to hold in other contexts,’
their predictive power remained weak (Wylie 1982: 386, original emphases). As a
result, the uniformitarian criterion required for extrapolating those laws towards
the past was not nearly met. It was not at all clear how contemporary inhabitants
of Tucson who had a broken watch or a malfunctioning Westminster could tell
us anything relevant about Palaeolithic behaviour in Europe. Most archaeologists
maintained that such uniformitarian assumptions could only hold for the more
mechanistic sort of historical processes (cf. Watson and Gould 1982: 362; 368).

Understanding the source
Law-building was an attempt to establish general correlations between statics and
dynamics which were believed to hold true across the most variegated sources;
it did not succeed in adequately understanding those links as it remained silent
on the underlying causal processes. The latter was precisely what Lewis Binford
envisaged with his ethnoarchaeologi­cal fieldwork among the Nunamiut: before
extrapolating present patterns to the past, before establishing cross-cultural lawlike generalizations, and in the absence of reliable independent testing, one first
had to understand the causal, relevant patterning between dynamic behaviour and
material results, that is one had to develop middle-range theory. He was very clear
about this in the introduction of Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology (1978b: 5-6):
The search for certain, relevant experience is the concern of this book. I am not
directly involved in hypothesis testing. I am not involved in a direct way with
the problem of explanations. I am concerned with sharing a series of concrete
experiences sought in the hope of uncovering some of the links between an ongoing
living system and the static archaeological products resulting from the dynamics
of the situation.

In Binford’s view, ethnoarchaeology did not proceed by testing or law-building but required a thorough understanding of the vertical relations of causality. Though Binford kept historical particularism of the ‘muddle-headed’ Boas at
16 Interestingly, this goes straight to the heart of an old debate in philosophy where the empiricist
Hume claimed that causality as such could never be seen but was a category read into the empirical
phenomena by mental habit.

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arm’s length, his causality programme was as a matter of fact very close to Boas’
demand for causal understanding in the comparative method. The neo-evolutionist sympathies notwithstanding, Binford’s logic of analogy echoes Boas far more
than Tylor. Like Boas, Binford was also wary about the possibilities of extrapolation;
a causal understanding of the present entity was already difficult enough, let alone an
inference from it about the past. But whereas Boas went further in his understanding of
individual cultures (and gave up the ambition to extrapolate), Binford started to work on
the least cultural aspects where extrapolation was still feasible.
Binford chose to focus on faunal assemblages because of the ‘completely culture-free taxonomy of bones’ (11). Human hunters were not actually making the
bones but only ‘partitioning, segmenting, and differentially distributing’ segments
of the animal carcass (11). Because the global anatomy of ungulates was the same
in the present as in the Palaeolithic (in terms of sort and number of bones), one
disposed of a uniformitarian anchor. Binford first attributed a ‘general utility index’ to the different anatomical parts of the caribou on the basis of their nutritive value of meat and marrow.17 He then investigated how this differential utility
could explain the differential representation of bones at functionally distinct sites.
He found that abandoned butchery sites were rich in skulls, antlers, maxillae and
other poorly nutritive parts of the carcass that were left behind after partitioning
the animal; base camps, on the other hand, had disproportionately large numbers
of femurs and humeri, i.e. the bones associated with most meat and marrow that
were introduced to the camp; while hunting camps where the least nutritious
parts of fresh kills were eaten before transport to the base camp contained mandibles, upper forelimbs and limb extremities. This pattern provided ‘the crucial
linkage of behavioral dynamics and statics’ (12). Binford believed it could be extrapolated towards the past:
My conclusion was that the formation processes of archaeological remains were
indeed common to both contemporary and past eras. Many of the animal species
present in assemblages are still extant, and the processes of exploitation and use
operative in the past are still operative today. (Binford 1978b: 12)

On the basis of this research, Legge and Rowley-Conwy started to re-analyse the
faunal remains from the site of Star Carr. The comparison of the differential presence of bones with the Nunamiut evidence suggested that the site must have been
used as ‘a hunting camp from where meat was removed to a base camp elsewhere’
(Legge and Rowley-Conwy 1988: 94). This interpretation was diametrically opposed to that of Clark, the site’s original excavator, who believed that it represented the remains of a community rather than ‘the activities of a specialized group’
(1954: 10). Interestingly, Clark too had come to his conclusion through an analogy with modern Eskimos: since skin-working was traditionally a feminine activity
17 Binford’s assessment was not just based on the utility of every individual bone. He too incorporated
the fact that a bone of lesser utility might ‘ride along’ one with higher utility if it happened to be
anatomically associated to it. This was for example the case of the poorly nutritive phalanges which
were attached to more richer parts of the hind legs.

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in Inuit society, the remains of such activity at Star Carr suggested to him that
women must have been present, next to men whose presence was attested by the
remains of hunting equipment and tool manufacture. The occurrence of two sexes
at the site led him to conclude he had to do with a community. The weakness of
this interpretation resided in the fact that there was no uniformitarian ground to
assume that the sexual division of labour among contemporary Inuit was the same
for the Mesolithic inhabitants of Britain. On top of that, the weight of the conclusion (‘the site was inhabited by a community’) rested on limited similarity (‘flint
scrapers and ox-bone scrapers which suggested skin-working’).18 And finally, there
was no demonstration of an unambiguous relationship between the activity of
skin-working or hunting and the sex performing that activity, let alone between
the presence of both sexes on a site and the fact of having a community. The interpretation uttered by Legge and Rowley-Conwy, on the other hand, benefited from
the fact that species like roe deer, red deer, elk and aurochs recovered at Star Carr
had the same number of bones as the caribou and roughly the same distribution
of nutritive parts across the carcass. The grounds for making a uniformitarian assumption were therefore much firmer. Of course, there was no reason to assume
that the hunters at Star Carr exploited animal carcasses as sensibly and economically as the Nunamiut did but similar patterns of exploitation were found so that
‘it would surely be perverse to argue that the similar patterns at Star Carr and
Kongumuvuk [one of Binford’s sites] result from different, culturally determined
behaviours’ (1988: 93).

Unambiguous and uniformitarian
The efficiency of analogical arguments, Binford reasoned, depended on the unambiguous links between statics and dynamics and the uniformitarian assumption between past and present. Not surprisingly, in his later work, he would turn
to those aspects of the archaeological record where cultural impact was minimal
and mechanical causation maximal: the physical modification of bone assemblages by human and nonhuman agents. Only in such fields could unambiguous and uniformitarian links be ascertained. His book Bones: Ancient Men and
Modern Myths (1981) was an attempt at establishing criteria that distinguished
human bone modifications like cut marks, breakage and chopping from animal
modifications like gnawing, tooth marks and trampling—criteria that were later used in his analyses of the faunal remains of Klasies River Mouth in South
Africa (Binford 1984a). As to unambiguity, he wrote: ‘In a very essential way the
18 Clark’s Eskimo analogy for Star Carr, despite Ascher’s enthusiasm for it, was seriously deficient. At
the base was the presence of flint scrapers which were interpreted as hide-working tools and the
presence of certain enigmatic, heavily-polished ox-bones. Clark inferred that the latter too must
have been used as hidescrapers because the Inuit used similar bones for working caribou skins (the
illustrations which accompanied that analogy were rather unconvincing). Thus a first analogy was
made for the functional interpretation of ox-bones as hidescrapers. A second analogy built on that
previous one by saying that skinworking was a feminine activity in Greenland and thus at Star Carr.
And finally, a third, if rather implicit, analogy was made when Clark reasoned that the presence of
both men and women at a site implied by definition a community. As such, an entire community
was projected at Star Carr largely on the basis of some polished ox-bones.

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contents of the archaeological record must be viewed as products of a complex
mechanical system of causation’ (1981: 26, original italics). He underlined that
he used the word causation in the strictest logical sense of a necessary, constant,
and unique pattern of association, similar to the relation between an animal and
its footprint. Such causation could only be observed in the present because the
archaeological record contained only the caused patterns, not the causing processes: ‘Only in the present can we observe the bear and the footprint together’
(29). Ethnoarchaeologists had thus to find links between statics and dynamics
that were both ‘redundant and unambiguous’ (26). Yet, Binford continued: ‘An
additional proposition must be met—that the same relationships obtained in the
past as obtained in the present between bears and their footprints!’ (27). This was
the very essence of the uniformitarian assumption, which he called ‘the interesting and important, perhaps crucial, problem archaeologists must solve’ (27). As it
provided ‘intellectual anchors’ between past and present, he contended that, like
in geology where the term had originated, ‘we must assume that knowledge gained
from actualistic studies is relevant and applicable to the living systems of the past’
(28, 27). Binford agreed that such was only feasible for certain classes of data:
‘Ecological and anatomical characteristics of species still extant with which ancient man interacted were enduring objects for which uniformitarian assumptions
might be securely warranted’ (28). With this constriction of ethnoarchaeology to
the most mechanical and immutable forms of patterning, we are far removed from
the 1960s hypothetico-deductive optimism that welcomed any source of analogy
as long as it was tested. As the strict separation of the context of discovery from
the context of justification was no longer tenable, it did again matter where the
analogy came from. The best proof of this change is that Binford opened the Bones
book with a historiographic chapter. Once you admit that the context of discovery can never totally be superseded through independent verification, it becomes
imperative that further research ‘be carried out with an appreciation of the intellectual history of the field’ (Binford 1981: 4). Whereas processual archaeology
had always had a rather minimal interest in disciplinary history (like most fields
dominated by a positivist epistemology), it was now admitted that the context of
discovery was more than peripheral (cf. Pinsky 1989).

Place and population: a case study
The testing through experimental archaeology (Tringham 1978), the reliance on
falsification (Gould 1980; Isaac 1984), the efforts at law-building (Schiffer 1978),
the attempts at causal understanding of source analogues (Binford 1978b), and
the search for processes with unambiguous and uniformitarian qualities (Binford
1981) were the main strategies summoned for improving the nature of ethnoarchaeological inferences. Because scholars worked in different fields of archaeological inquiry, it is perhaps useful to look at a small case-study in order to appreciate
the differences between the approaches outlined above. In that respect, the estimation of population size from a given settlement of hunter-gatherers provides an
illuminating example.

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Naroll’s constant and Bonnichsen’s caution
Already in 1962, the demographer Raoul Naroll attempted to devise a formula
for inferring the number of occupants of a given settlement from its covered floor
space. On the basis of a cross-cultural sample of 18 modern cultures, he argued
that ‘the population of a prehistoric settlement can be very roughly estimated
by archaeologists as of the order of one-tenth of the floor area in square meters
occupied by its dwellings’ (1962: 588). ‘Naroll’s constant’, as the equation became popularly known, predated the rise of ethnoarchaeological fieldwork and
was strictly based on existing literature. As such, cross-cultural ethnography was
invoked for the same inspirational purposes as in Ucko’s study of mortuary behaviour, although it obviously went further in that it contained an early example
of law-building. Inevitably, the logic of the New Archaeologists required that the
predictions from such formula had to be independently tested against archaeological evidence. Bonnichsen’s study of a recently abandoned Cree campsite in the
Canadian Rocky Mountains provided a cautionary tale for the assessment of population figures on the basis of material remains (figure 9). Whereas he inferred on
the basis of archaeological evidence that the site must have been occupied by ‘two
family groups using similar features’ (1972: 283-4), one of its former inhabitants
rectified that conclusion by informing that ‘the permanent residents in the camp
included Millie [the informant], her teenage daughter, and her eight-year-old son.
On weekends Millie’s husband and two adult sons came home from the Grande
Cache coal mine where they were working’ (285). The ‘intuitive method of inferential reasoning’ archaeologists relied upon had once more proven wrong (277).

Yellen’s generalization
Ethnoarchaeologist John Yellen regarded such ‘spoiler’ approaches as insufficient
but realized at the same time that the requirements of hypothetico-deductive testing were ‘overly restrictive, given the incomplete nature of most archaeological
data and the difficulty of “proof ”’ (1977: 6). On top of that, Yellen argued that
Naroll’s constant had only limited application for Palaeolithic contexts where the
essential variable of ‘covered floor space’ could only be guessed at. His ethnoarchaeology of the !Kung San, therefore, attempted to devise a criterion that was
more relevant for foraging societies with simple and perishable living structures.
From the 15 !Kung camps where both social and spatial variables were known, he
calculated that the size of the space between the huts (the ‘inner ring’ or hut circle) co-varied with the number of occupants, and that the size of the surrounding
space (the ‘outer ring’ where activities areas were found) correlated with the length
of occupation (figure 10). Using these correlations, he devised a number of equations which had to enable the Palaeolithic archaeologist to predict the population
size and duration of occupation of a given site. Yellen named this model ‘the single
most important contribution’ he had made but admitted at the same time that
‘in the event that [archaeological] data do not fit into this mold, I am uncertain
just what the next step should be’ (131). The reason for this was, that despite his
interest in the ‘underlying mechanisms’ of the given correlations (101), he had re-

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Figure 9. Bonnichsen agreed that the archaeological record reflected social behaviour but in
his interpretation of Millie’s camp, a recently-abandoned Indian site, he came to the conclusion that the archaeologist’s conclusions were often incorrect. Early ethnoarchaeology served a
cautionary function (Bonnichsen 1972: figure 2)

frained from unravelling the relevant causal processes. Yellen’s work was therefore
an attempt at law-building in the sense of using empirical generalizations from
ethnography to make predictive equations for archaeology on the basis of behaviour-material correlations whose causality was not further specified.

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Binford’s causes
According to Binford, Yellen ‘never isolated a cause’ (1978c: 322). Binford vehemently criticized the !Kung ethnoarchaeology: ‘This is a description of the way
the world is or appears. It is not an explanation’ (321). In his paper ‘Dimensional
analysis of behavior and site structure’ (1978c), Binford applied Yellen’s equations
to an Eskimo hunting stand in Alaska and found that they gave very wrong results
compared to what he had observed ethnoarchaeologically. Binford did not see
the Nunamiut as deviations of the general rule; instead he contended that ‘some
“other things” are causing the Nunamiut case’. The understanding of these causes
was the gist of Binford’s work in the late 1970s:
I have argued that empirical generalizations, no matter how complicated (as,
for example, Yellen’s observations on site size and group size and occupational
duration), are what we seek to understand, and only with understanding can we
anticipate how observations will vary under changed conditions. The latter is, of
course, what we mean by predictions. Our ability to anticipate variability in the
world is in turn a measure of our understanding. (1978c: 323)

Figure 10. Yellen studied !Kung settlements to extract generalizations about hunter-gatherer
spatial behaviour. He reasoned that the communal area would increase with the number of
huts (nuclear areas). The inner ring was thus believed to be an expression of group size. The
outer ring was seen as a function of the time during which the settlement was used, since this
is where special activities took place (Yellen 1977: figure 12)

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Binford went into great efforts to disentangle the relevant variables which had
been responsible for the site formation at an Eskimo hunting stand (figure 11).
He had spent several days in the early 1970s describing Nunamiut behaviour at
such game observation point and inventorying the material remains left behind
between the glacial boulders that surrounded the site. All sorts of measurements
like the distance of each hunter to the fire and the tossing distance for sardine
cans were taken to find out the relevant behavioural causes for archaeological
site formation. He argued that the sort of activities carried out at the site, the
technological organization of those activities, their spatial organization, and the
form of disposal of material items (like tossing and dropping), formed an intricate
and complex web of explanatory variables. At several places in the paper, Binford
started to play with those variables in order to see the effects on the archaeological
record. ‘Let us imagine,’ he said for example, ‘no marrow bones are being eaten,
only dried meat’ (318). Bone chips and splinters would thus be absent, so that the
drop zones in front of the individuals would be fairly empty, the highest density
of materials being found in the toss zones behind the occupants, so that disposal
areas would be better represented than activity areas. Like a puppeteer, Binford
pulled the relevant strings in order to see how the archaeological record reacted.
The paper was not a methodological statement (although the terms ‘drop zone’
and ‘toss zone’ gained widespread attention) but ‘an exercise in theory building’
which presented some personal ideas:
They are not empirical generalizations. I am not offering inductive arguments
or arguments from ethnographic analogy. I am not saying that all men will
conduct the same activities in hunting camps. I am not saying that all men will
play cards in sites with glacial boulders in them. I am not saying that all target
shooting was normally conducted away from the group because of the noise of rifle
fire! I am saying that my study has prompted my imagination. I have been able
to imagine patterns of interaction among variables which could result in different
patterning in the archaeological record. (1978c: 320, original emphases)

Binford had arrived at a causal understanding of site formation in one ethnographic source, but refused to project it towards an archaeological target because
it lacked a uniformitarian ground. His original intention had first and foremost
been on the level of middle-range theory, i.e. the study of statics and dynamics in
an ongoing system; in the absence of uniformitarianism, extrapolation to the past
was simply not an option. The challenge had been one of ‘reducing ambiguity
and increasing the accuracy with which we may analytically identify past causes of
variability in the archaeological record’ (Binford 1984b: 255). Whereas Binford
increasingly turned to data sets where the criteria of unambiguous causation and
uniformitarian assumption were more easily met, the result of his ethnoarchaeology showed that the estimation of population size on the basis of ethnographic
data was far more complex than the application of a simple formula.

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O’Connell’s source variety and Gould and Yellen’s predator theory
The debate on site structure continued unabated in the 1980s. Binford’s student
James O’Connell studied spatial patterning among the Alyawara, an Australian
group of hunter-gatherers (1987). He tried to disentangle the relevant determinants of Alyawara site structure but went further than Binford’s study of the
Eskimo hunting stand by comparing his case with the site structure of two other ethnoarchaeologically known hunter-gatherer societies: the !Kung and the
Nunamiut. He thus looked for relevant dimensions of variability that were applicable beyond a single ethnographic instance. !Kung site structure was found to
be ‘very similar’ (99) to the Alyawara system in terms of an internal organization

Figure 11. Binford argued that before the present source is extrapolated towards the past, it
should be properly understood, even in the most minute details. His study at Mask site, a
caribou hunting stand used by contemporary Nunamiut, disentangled the factors responsible
for the production of the archaeological record, such as wind direction, type of crafts, actvities
and number of occupants (Binford 1978c: figure 21.5)

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around nuclear household areas and a lack of spatial segregation of activities,
the only difference being that the distance between households was considerably larger among the Australian aboriginals. On the other hand, the Nunamiut
represented a very different pattern: there was a distinction between winter and
summer camps, activities were often spatially segregated, and internal differentiation was higher. O’Connell tentatively inferred that most of the variability in site
structure between the foraging societies under investigation was a function of the
degree of reliance on food storage, seasonal variation in weather, household population size, and the length of occupation. He coupled his conclusions to Binford’s
(1980) earlier distinction between the settlement systems of forager versus collector economies of hunter-gatherers. Whereas foragers like the !Kung relied on
immediate consumption of food assembled during the radial foraging trips from a
base-camp, collectors like the Nunamiut relied on storage of very large quantities
of food that were seasonally obtained. The former gave rise to a fairly undifferentiated settlement system of central places with only minor differences between
them; the latter resulted in a complex system of residential sites next to special
activity sites (such as hunting stands, kill sites, butchering sites, and caches) with
substantial differences in spatial layout and faunal representation. O’Connell thus
attempted to delineate the causal processes responsible for the observed variability
among hunter-gatherer use of space.
In a paper published the same year, Gould and Yellen (1987) focused on
the differences in household spacing between the !Kung and Western Desert
Australian aborigines. How come, they wondered, that with foragers living in
similar arid conditions shelters and huts are placed on average only 7 m apart
among the !Kung and more than 35 m apart among the Australian aboriginals
(a pattern that had also been noted by O’Connell)? They put forward six different causes of this variability in residential spacing (kinship, the degree of sharing,
the length of occupation, the size of the household, the body size of prey, and
predation), and selected the latter, fear of predation, as the key to understanding
the observed patterns: in the Kalahari desert all large southern African predators
like lions, leopards, hyenas, and cheetahs were present; in the Western Desert of
Australia these were entirely absent. Not unlike O’Connell, Gould and Yellen
tried to distil the relevant causality of settlement spacing that was applicable in
several distinct hunter-gatherer contexts. Their hypothesis, however, was fiercely
attacked by Binford who came up with numerous counterexamples of tight spacing in Australia and loose spacing in the Kalahari, of high residential density in
predator-free contexts and low residential density in predator-rich environments,
all of which were meant to demonstrate ‘the inadequacy of the “predator fear”
argument’ (1991a: 268). Binford indicated that the relation between faunal environment and settlement behaviour was far more complex, a lesson which went
hand in hand with his preference for the more uniformitarian matters of the archaeological record. Site structure could not be reduced to a single environmental variable but required an appreciation of the multiple dimensions underlying
cross-cultural variability. However, what we see in the work of O’Connell, Gould
and Yellen is the ambition to go beyond to study of a single ethnoarchaeological

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case in order to increase the number and variety of source contexts from which
to reason.

Whitelaw’s world sample
This was the point of departure for Todd Whitelaw’s work on community space
among hunter-gatherers. Against Binford’s obsession with mechanistic aspects of
material causation, Whitelaw wrote:
While processual archaeology directed toward the development of middle range
theory has stuck to a relatively safe path by addressing patterns in material behaviour for which a uniformitarian assumption can be made, the range of questions
for which such an approach is fruitful appears to be fairly limited. (Whitelaw
1991: 183).

Whitelaw believed that a different path in actualistic studies could be less restrictive and even ‘involve inferences about past individuals’ perceptions and decisions
where there may be more than one potential pattern of behaviour’ (139). How
could one alleviate the uniformitarian and unambiguous requirements and at the
same time maintain a high degree of inferential confidence? Whitelaw’s answer to
that question was fairly ingenious and merits some closer attention. First of all, on
the basis of ethnohistorical, ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological publications
he assembled a world-wide sample of about 800 hunter-gatherer settlements from
112 known foraging societies for which a good plan and an estimate of population
size could be obtained (or at least reconstructed).19 He then studied the patterns of
settlement spacing and the demographic figures to infer occupation density (figure 12). Not denying the reality of differences between cultures, he demonstrated
that these differences could be seen ‘as systematic variations within different social
and ecological contexts’ (181). The determinant variables for settlement spacing
he found were kinship (close kin tended to live close to each other), group size
(larger groups showed lower occupation densities), ecological context (subarctic
and arctic groups showed low occupation density, groups living in savannah or
tropical contexts had higher densities), and the degree of sedentism (residential
spacing increases with the length of occupation). Just like Binford, O’Connell,
and Gould and Yellen had done before him, Whitelaw tried to disentangle the
relevant variables of the complex phenomenon of settlement spacing. Just like
them, too, he did not rest with just indicating correlations between certain variables but sought to define the underlying causes. For instance, he noted that the
ecological variable in residential spacing had to be understood in terms of whether
or not a certain biome encouraged cooperation in subsistence-related activities.
In desert contexts, foragers mostly relied upon plant foods which are gathered
and consumed individually so that settlement spacing tends to be rather large.
On the other hand, in tropical biomes, meat becomes a major dietary component
19 Particularly well documented communities even provided further information on subgroups and discrete spatial clusters, amounting the sample to a total of 1762 different social situations (Whitelaw
1991: 141).

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which requires maximal cooperation both in acquisition (hunting) and in consumption (collective and immediate consumption is imperative as preservation
conditions are poor); occupation density is thus very high. Although arctic foragers equally subsist upon animal resources acquired through collective hunting, the
possibility of storage by drying and freezing meat minimizes the need for shared
consumption, thus encouraging individual consumption and residential spacing.
Whereas Binford had only outlined the causal patterns for one particular site
and O’Connell, Gould and Yellen for only a handful of hunter-gatherer societies,
Whitelaw went further and devised a set of globally applicable processes. The differences between the !Kung and the Nunamiut social use of space which made
Yellen’s formula inappropriate for Binford’s analysis were now accounted for by
the same set of behavioural rules. Whitelaw had expanded Binford’s quest far a
causal understanding into a global, cross-cultural system of foraging adaptation.
Generally parsimonious with compliments, Binford applauded Whitelaw for having ‘most elegantly laid out’ the problem of site structure (1991b: 25); ‘Whitelaw’s
work is important’ because he ‘has isolated some truly provocative patterning’
(1991a: 274, 269). Unlike Schiffer, Whitelaw did not seek homogenizing crosscultural laws of human behaviour which were universally valid and uniform but
tried to account for cross-cultural variability in human behaviour.
What was the archaeological value of this work? How could the patterns of settlement spacing of the few remaining hunter-gatherers shed any light on the range
of prehistoric behaviour which was presumably much more diverse? Although
Whitelaw acknowledged the role of social factors like kinship and group size, he
opted for ‘an explicitly ecological perspective’ because this allowed ‘the development of expectations of variation in behaviour, based on different patterns of

Figure 12. A worldwide ethnographic sample assembled by Whitelaw shows a general tendency between community population and occupation density. Whitelaw dissected this ‘cloud’
into various ecological zones and sought to account for the resultant patterns (Whitelaw 1991:
figure 4)

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subsistence exploitation’ (183). Given the basic ecology of a region, one could
make a prediction on settlement spacing from Whitelaw’s model. This did not
lead to a simple projection because the other side of the equation, i.e. settlement
spacing, could be independently assessed in the archaeological record. Both ecology and residential spacing were archaeologically observable variables. Therefore,
Whitelaw’s model allowed ‘to cope with differences in the context between the
source and subject of analogies, such that our reconstructions will be context-specific, and not simply a projection of the same simple model onto the past’ (183).
In fact, the model ‘could be falsified through comparison with the excavated evidence’20 so that uniqueness of the past was recoverable ‘beyond the limited sample of human behaviour actually documented historically and ethnographically’
(183). As such, Whitelaw’s tour de force integrated Gould’s claim for recognizing
archaeological ‘anomalies’ through falsification, Schiffer’s search for cross-cultural
principles, and Binford’s insistence on causal understanding, while at the same
time making use of settlement data provided by the ethnoarchaeology of Yellen,
Gould and others. Although the precise estimation of population figures was not
directly what Whitelaw’s model envisaged, the relation between social and spatial
behaviour in foraging societies had been greatly elucidated by benefiting from two
decades of intense debate on the nature of ethnographic analogy.

Source and subject-side strategies
From Bonnichsen’s cautionary tale to Whitelaw’s model, the debate on site structure reveals how ethnoarchaeology has gone a long way in discussing logical difficulties and enhancing interpretative possibilities from the argument by analogy.
The enormous growth of ethnoarchaeological studies in the second half of the
1970s, therefore, was more than a scaling-up of the New Archaeology’s interest in
anthropology but entailed a profound rethinking of the concept of ethnographic
analogy. The two main functions of analogy in the late 1960s—inspirational and
critical—paled into insignificance at the moment ethnoarchaeological fieldwork
was undertaken at a much larger scale than ever before. Once the deficiency of
independent testing as a means of hypothesis-evaluation had been demonstrated,
the use of ethnography could no longer be said to be simply heuristic; what was
the point of having a profusion of ideas if there was no means of evaluating them?
Likewise, the genre of the cautionary tale lost attraction; again, what was the point
of repeatedly stressing the difficulty of interpretation without trying to remedy
it?
At the cutting edge of modern ethnoarchaeology scholars strove to go beyond
such minimal functions and were forced to address the issue of analogy. Whereas
archaeologists in the previous decade had been at pains to circumvent analogy,
now they approached it frontally. Following Wylie, their approaches can be classified into ‘source and subject-side strategies for establishing relevance’ (1985: 100).
20 Such falsification was only possible for well-preserved ‘snapshot sites’ with assumed residential
function (such as certain sections of Pincevent). The more complex (and much more frequent)
palimpsests are of little help here.

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Processualists realized in practice her device that ‘archaeologists must work aggressively at both sides of the analogical “equation” ’ (101). At the subject side (or target side as we would call it), analogical inferences were strengthened by improving
the procedures of archaeological testing. The most momentous of such strategies
consisted of monitoring analogical predictions into falsificationist channels as this
allowed to detect unique features of the past that were ethnographically unknown.
Falsificationism in archaeology originally started as a means to enhance testing
but soon developed, particularly in the archaeology of African hominids, into
entirely new fields of research like taphonomy and site formation processes. The
principal ambition was the elucidation through actualistic research of the relevant
processes responsible for the formation of the archaeological record. At the source
side, we find strategies like law-building, causal understanding and the uniformitarianism-unambiguity programme of research. Despite their typical differences,
all these approaches shared a focus on the relevant processes between statics and
dynamics in the source. Schiffer sought universal correlations in the present world
between the systemic context of behaviour and the archaeological context of material remains. Binford tried to understand such correlations in a causal way, first
in an explanatory fashion which was strictly confined to a particular situation
in the present, but eventually in an extrapolating fashion that was based on the
principle of uniformitarianism. Whitelaw attempted to devise a cross-cultural set
of variables responsible for a particular form of material behaviour that could in
principle be falsified archaeologically. In sum, then, the most striking feature of
such source-side strategies was their universal attention to the relevant relations of
causation. An ethnographic analogy could only be successful if due consideration
was first given to the dynamic processes in the source from which the analogy was
to be drawn. Actualistic research in taphonomy had worked from the same principle: first understanding present processes, then turning to past patterns. While
traditional ethnographic analogies had universally relied upon the horizontal relation of similarity, the great merit of ethnoarchaeology was its focus on the vertical
relation of causality. The issue of relevance thus surpassed the amount of similarity as the prime criterion for analogical reasoning.
Whereas target-side strategies enhanced the empirical content of analogical argu­
ments, source-side strategies were more directed at improving the logical structure
of the analogy. Next to the consideration being given to relevance, a number of
other strengthening criteria received further attention. Whitelaw’s sample of 800
settlements from 112 different foraging societies, brought the number of source
contexts well beyond the ca. 50 known settlement plans from about fifteen huntergatherer cultures. Similarly, Schiffer’s attempt to draw laws from contexts as diverse as modern North-America and contemporary hunter-gatherers shows how
the variety of source contexts was appreciated as an important criterion. Finally,
Gould’s interest for anomaly and the falsification Isaac and Whitelaw called for
are indicative of the place dissimilarity could take in their analogical arguments.
Once that formal similarity was no longer the sole criterion, a certain discrepancy
between source and target could be easily accommodated and even welcomed.

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The ethnoarchaeology of the late 1970s, then, genuinely moved beyond the
criterion of formal similarity. Indeed, it was generally acknowledged that ‘the lifestyles of prehistoric hunting and gathering groups are not necessarily or even likely replicated by recent surviving counterparts’ (Yellen 1977: 4). This awareness of
difference did not lead to despondency. Quite on the contrary, it served as a challenge for inventive work on the structure of analogical reasoning. Had culture-historical archaeologists been at pains to find modern analogues that were as close as
possible in time and space to the prehistoric culture under consideration, processual ethnoarchaeology blossomed, not despite the agreed upon distance between
source and target, but thanks to it. Contemporary societies functioned therefore
as imported analogues rather than as manifest analogues (Leatherdale 1974).
Concomitant to the substantial work in ethnoarchaeology was a greater positive appraisal of the place of analogy and the logic it involved. A couple of publications in the early 1980s explicitly discussed the logical structure of archaeological analogies from a philosophical point of view (Salmon 1982; Watson, LeBlanc
and Redman 1984; Wylie 1982 and especially Wylie 1985). Salmon defended
the logical point that ‘analogical arguments are not intrinsically weaker than any
other inductive arguments’ (1982: 79). Watson, LeBlanc and Redman, once the
staunchest advocates of deductive reasoning in archaeology, now accepted that
‘the basic principle of all archaeological interpretation is analogical,’ even if such
reasoning required ‘an inductive leap’ (1984: 259, 260). And Wylie held that
‘though the argument by analogy is inevitably liable to error, it can be closely
controlled and highly discriminating with regard to dissimilarities between past
and present’ (1985: 107). All authors agreed that the amount of similarity was
a relatively unimportant aspect of analogical reasoning. A good analogy did not
require that source and subject be identical: ‘archaeologists do not argue that
past cultures are exactly similar to present ones’ (Watson, LeBlanc and Redman
1984: 261). Both Wylie and Salmon described at length the logical criterions for
assessing and strengthening analogical arguments and they both emphasized the
all-important criterion of relevance: ‘Relevance is the most important consideration in assessing the success of an analogical argument’ (Salmon 1982: 82). Wylie
drew the valuable distinction between formal and relational analogies whereby
only the latter were explicitly based on considerations of relevance. Formal analogies were inevitably weaker since they strictly relied on formal similarities without
an awareness of causality. Relational analogies, on the other hand, were more interesting since they involved ‘a demonstration that there are similarities between
source and subject with respect to the causal mechanisms, processes, or factors
that determine the presence and relationships of (at least some of ) their manifest
properties’ (1985: 95). These logical reflections, in fact, reformulated in a more
abstract language one of the most fundamental changes that had occurred in ethnoarchaeology, i.e. the idea that proximity between source and target was not an
absolute, nor a sufficient criterion.

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Decline and fall of ethnoarchaeology
From the discussion on hunter-gatherer site structure, it becomes clear that ethnoarchaeology did not die out after the triumphant semidecade from 1977 to
1982. An increasing number of archaeologists spent some time in the ethnographic field, joint the discussion, and contributed to the amassing wealth of ethnoarchaeological literature. Had the studies on contemporary foragers originally
been limited to the !Kung and the Nunamiut, now new fieldwork by Binford
and O’Connell brought the Alyawara (Australia) and the Hadza (East-Africa)
into the picture during the 1980s (Binford 1984c; 1986; 1987; O’Connell 1987;
O’Connell, Hawkes and Blurton Jones 1988a; 1988b; O’Connell and Marshall
1989). Likewise, Yellen’s work on the !Kung was continued, expanded and followed up by scholars like Polly Wiessner (1983) and Susan Kent (1993). The same
holds true for some other projects outside the hunter-gatherer realm: Longacre’s
ceramic study in the Kalinga area (Philippines) became the longest continuous
investigation in ethnoarchaeology where several generations of American graduate
students from the University of Arizona did research (Longacre 1991; Longacre
and Skibo 1994). On top of that, ethnoarchaeology remained no longer something of a North-American monopoly now that British scholars (like Ian Hodder
and Henrietta Moore) and French scholars (like the Petrequins and Alain Gallay)
joined the ranks.21
The field benefited furthermore from the logical and philosophical expositions on the proper use of analogy further (Salmon 1982; Wylie 1982; 1985).
Inductive logic was consulted to understand the internal mechanism of the argument by analogy, strength criteria were enumerated and checked, and the importance of formal similarity was shown to be secondary to relevant causality. Though
analogies were admitted to be inductive arguments which are inherently weaker
than deductive reasonings, the general opinion was that they are not all equally
valid but can be assessed in terms of relative strength. One of the principal consequences of this logical clarification was that analogy was no longer considered
the Achilles heel of ethnoarchaeology but became the accepted basis for all ethnoarchaeological inference. Authors with the most divergent theoretical agendas
agreed on this point when they exclaimed that ‘analogy is a basic and fundamental

21 Alain Gallay, a Swiss by birth, has made a large impact in French academe (cf. Ethnoarchéologie:
Justification, Problèmes, Limites: XIIe Rencontres Internationales d’Archéologie et d’Histoire d’Antibes.
Editions APDCA, Juan-les-Pins, 1992). It deserves to be noted that in general the French archaeological tradition has been rather reluctant towards the use of ethnography (Sackett 1981).
Whereas Parisian académiciens in the early eighteenth century had been instrumental in drawing
upon ethnography to understand flint tools, this interest was bracketed during the following centuries. Remember how De Mortillet’s paléoethnologie was an attempt to write an ethnology of the
Palaeolithic precisely without recourse to actual ethnology. Similarly, Leroi-Gourhan has systematically called for une ethnologie préhistorique in his interpretation of the Magdalenian site of Pincevent,
that is, an ethnological reconstruction of the prehistoric past solely on the basis of prehistoric evidence. François Bordes, the other leading French prehistorian of the mid-twentieth century whose
geology-inspired research programme differed profoundly from Leroi-Gourhan’s more historical
approach, disavowed the use of ethnography with a similar vehemence.

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tool of middle-range research’ (Binford 1987: 505) or that ‘all archaeology is based
on analogy’ (Hodder 1982a: 9).22
Although initially continuing the work of the processual heyday, in the long
run ethnoarchaeology also underwent major changes in terms of aims, methods
and functions. To understand these changes, it is advisable to look first at what
happened to the two classical themes of the Binfordian research programme in
hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeology: the study of site structure and faunal analysis.

The isolation of hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeology
Binford’s Nunamiut research remained the most influential ethnoarchaeological
study on hunter-gatherers throughout the 1980s. In a recent review essay, James
O’Connell (1995) identified the work on site structure and faunal remains as two
of the most prominent subfields in modern ethnoarchaeology as they had been
the focus of very intensive research and played a crucial role in Palaeolithic studies. Both themes went back to the Nunamiut publications. The discussion on site
structure, as described in the previous section, built further upon Binford’s articles
‘Learning from an Eskimo hunting stand’ (1978c) and ‘Willow smoke and dogs’
tails’ (1980). The discussion on faunal remains was to a large extent provoked
by Binford’s monographs on differential body part representation (Nunamiut
Ethnoarchaeology, 1978b) and bone modifications (Bones, 1981). O’Connell’s article, which is in the first place a long bibliographic essay, gives an impression of
the masses of work undertaken in these and closely related fields: the bibliography counts up to more than 400 references (404), 90 % of which were published
after 1980. It includes papers with themes varying from a study of ‘variability in
long bone marrow yields of East African ungulates’ to an ‘ethnoarchaeological
model for the identification of prehistoric teepee rings in the boreal forest’. Once
restricted to a discussion between Binford, Yellen and to a lesser extent Gould,
hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeology had now become a wide-ranging, multifarious,
and complex field of debate which witnessed an enormous burst of activity during
the next fifteen years.
Inevitably, this boost of attention led to an increasingly specialized field.
This can already be noted from the format of publishing research results: had
Binford, Yellen, Brain and Gould been able to expound their views in booklength treatments which attracted a relatively wide readership, now most studies
appeared as technical articles (often multi-authored ones) in specialist journals
like Journal of Archaeological Research, Journal of Anthropological Research, Journal
of Anthropological Archaeology, and Journal of Archaeological Science. What had
once been a general debate on the nature of archaeological inference came to be
a highly technical field of specialist expertise where publications were no longer
the product of one individual’s pen and creativity, but the result of collective
teamwork efforts. This was less the case for the discussion on site structure which
continued as a fairly homogeneous debate where only more dimensions and more
ethnographic data were drawn in than it was for faunal analysis. The initial work
22 But see Kent (1987) for one of the rare, more sceptical voices.

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by Binford and Brain was carried on by a host of scholars like Pat Shipman, Dian
Gifford, Lee Lyman, Richard Potts, Henry Bunn, Anna Behrensmeyer, Robert
Blumenschine, and Gary Haynes and developed into one of the most technical
and diversified realms of archaeological research.
Firstly, the research on bone modification by human and nonhuman agents
had originally kicked off as part of the broadly relevant question of early hominid
diet and the role of hunting therein (Gifford 1981; Lyman 1987): Isaac affirmed
that the accumulations of bone and stone in East-African sites were home bases
of hunting hominids; Binford denied such claims (and Brain did the same for
the South-African cave sites); Isaac’s students started to falsify the propositions
(by distinguishing stone tool cutmarks from carnivore tooth scratches and rodent
gnawing marks; cf. Shipman and Rose 1983); originally they reaffirmed the original hypothesis for early hominid hunting, butchering and carcass processing at
Olduvai Gorge and Koobi Fora (Bunn and Kroll 1986) but Binford systematically
criticized such claims. Had the discussion originally been on the role of meat in
early hominid subsistence, now authors vehemently disagreed on issues whether
hominids had exploited carcasses before or after hyena scavenging (Binford, Mills
and Stone 1987; cf. Binford and Stone 1986). Parallel to that, the requirement
of technical skills on the part of the researchers became more stringent: macroscopic inspection was replaced by observations obtained through a scanning
electron microscope; analytical categories for describing bone modification became increasingly minute; knowledge on carnivore and rodent ethology, chemical
composition of bones, geomorphological abrasion and whole range of other fields
became prerequisite. Interdisciplinary cooperation between multiple scholars with
varying scientific backgrounds became the new role model. The study of bone
modification thus developed into a highly sophisticated, natural science branch
of Palaeolithic research.
Secondly, the study of differential body part representations started from a
similar straightforward question and devolved also into a technical conundrum
where causes and consequences became increasingly difficult to disentangle. In
Binford’s original work, the nutritional value of a skeletal part (expressed in terms
of meat and marrow utility) was the main determinant of the presence or absence of it on certain types of sites. Later research showed that much more factors were in play such as prey size, transport facilities, storage possibility, mode of
cooking, form of sharing, predator action, etcetera (Yellen 1991a, b; Kent 1993;
Lupo 1995). Scholars were at pains to distil further dimensions that bore on the
production of faunal assemblages to the point that an explanatory model became
harder and harder to reach. The puppet of the archaeological record seemed to be
steered by much more strings than previously expected; the relevant mechanism
became increasingly difficult to disentangle: ‘many of the principles are not clearcut and do not provide simple links to reliable reconstructions of the past,’ some
authors had to grant (Bunn, Bartram and Kroll 1988: 453). Whereas Binford had
contended himself to dissecting one sheep and one caribou, now ‘the effect of
structural density on marmot skeletal part representation in archaeological sites’
and ‘a meat utility index for phocid seals’ were being investigated, to name but

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two articles of that period. The debate on skeletal element representation turned
into a specialist and diversified field that risked loosing touch with the original
archaeological question.
In a different context, Longacre and Skibo (1994: xiv) noted that during
ethnoar­chaeological work it often ‘becomes clear that the question is much more
complicated than originally thought’. And although this is probably the case with
most empirical research, in the case of hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeology there
were Palaeolithic researchers ‘at home’ waiting for answers: ‘it is easy to see how a
prehistorian could become frustrated with ethnoarchaeology, as seemingly simple
questions are broken down into various parts that may seem far removed from
the archaeological record’ (Longacre and Skibo 194: xiv). Other scholars too have
noted this. Gifford-Gonzalez (1991: 246) warned that ‘archaeology as a whole has
moved increasingly deeply into specialization’; Hodder (1982b: 214) indicated
the ‘massive fragmentation and compartmentalisation’ of research as one of the
reasons for the decline of processualism.
Ethnoarchaeology became not only more technical but also more limited in
its scope. Originally, actualistic studies and middle-range research had been formulated as the necessary step of understanding site formation before issues of
general theory could be addressed. In the long run, however, it became an end
in itself: ‘In their haste to put aside vacuous theorizing, middle-range theorists
seem to have accepted the myth that their research can proceed in the absence of
general theory,’ the result being ‘a widespread confusion regarding the nature of
middle-range research’ (Bettinger 1987: 138). Even if students of bone modification became quite successful through the use of actualistic research in identifying
the causal agent responsible for a given trace, the wider behavioural implication
remained more often than not unclear. Hominid-induced cutmarks could be recognized as such, the question whether they related to scavenging or hunting was
still unanswered. Identifying the responsible causal agent was thus one problem,
interpreting it in terms of behaviour quite another. Binford had been taking his
logical premises to such extremes that he had driven himself into a corner where
only very minimal statements could be made about very mechanical patterns.23
Diane Gifford-Gonzalez (1991) convincingly argued that studies in zooarchaeology and bone taphonomy reached high levels of inferential confidence for the most
functional and mechanistic links between traces and causes, but stayed underdeveloped for drawing broader behavioural and ecological conclusions. The insistence on finding unambiguous and uniformitarian causal linkages had turned the
Binfordian middle-range research into an increasingly technical enterprise which
showed great reluctance to more interpretative strategies. Such physicalist-reductionist and deterministic approaches continued to ‘hamper us at our next stage of
research’ , Gifford-Gonzalez argued (1991: 244):

23 When asked about this minimalism in the early 1980s during a visit in Sweden, Binford replied, true
to the positivist belief in the growth of knowledge, that archaeology needed a few more centuries to
reach reliable inferences about less mechanical patterns (K. Kristiansen, pers. comm.).

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No matter how deterministic the relationship between the immediate causes of
certain archaeological traces—and even their links to specific actors—are, when
archaeologists seek to set these traces and actors in behavioral and ecological systems, the probabilistic nature of the operations of these systems preclude extending “if a, then b” deterministic statements into those realms. (Gifford-Gonzalez
1991: 241)

If archaeology wanted to be a truly behavioural science, more than such safe but
sterile claims had to be made. Gifford-Gonzalez therefore reasserted ‘the importance of comprehensive, conjunctive analysis’ (246) and granted a place to ‘historical narratives’ (242) as satisfactory evolutionary explanations. Despite ‘an extraordinary successful 20-year phase of revealing ancient causes of bone modification’,
she insisted that more interpretative work be undertaken: ‘bones themselves are
not enough’ (246). O’Connell (1995), too, after listing hundreds of publications
suggested that the quality of the analogies lagged behind with the amount of actualistic research conducted since the early 1980s. The wealth of ethnoarchaeological efforts in the study of site structure and faunal remains only seemed to
indicate that there were no straightforward causal linkages between behavioural
processes and material patterns. As a result, the current role of actualistic research
simply became ‘the production of cautionary tales and conventional analogies’
(O’Connell 1995: 233). This meant an unabashed return to what ethnoarchaeology initially had tried to escape: the critical and inspirational purposes of analogy.
Clearly, this was only a very minimal output for a field which required such high
technical input and this imbalance started to undermine ethnoarchaeology’s raison
d’être.
Another reason which contributed to the increasingly problematic position of
hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeology concerned the very polemical climate of scholarly debate. Binford, in particular, conducted a number of discussions with a
vehemence of style rarely seen in scholarly discourse. Even if in the 1960s and
70s he had always been a provocative and very critical author who did not shun a
rhetorical style, most, if not all, his papers in the 1980s consisted of fulminating
attacks against the work of his colleagues. Whereas his collection of papers from
the 1970s, a decade typified by his substantial contributions in theory and ethnoarchaeology, had been appropriately entitled Working at Archaeology (1983b),
the one which assembled his work from the 1980s was even more aptly named
Debating Archaeology (1989). After his disputes with Yellen and Isaac, Binford
now crossed swords, among others, with Schiffer on the Pompeii premise, with
Bunn on early hominid butchering at the Zinjanthropus site (Olduvai Gorge),
with Freeman on Mousterian bone technology, with Sackett on the definition of
style, with Hodder on the aims of archaeological research, and with Gould on
about everything the latter had written since his negative review of Nunamiut
Ethnoarchaeology. These attacks contained a set of fixed ingredients: Binford’s
complaint that he had been misread, misunderstood, and misrepresented (illustrated by means of long quotes from his and others’ writings), the mercilessly
chopping down of the other’s arguments, a long, poorly structured section which

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sketched an alternative on the basis of his own ethnographic observations among
the Nunamiut and the Alyawara incorporating multiple tables and graphs, and finally an abstract plea for how a ‘germane’ archaeology should be done. The tone of
debate was often far from gentle. Bunn and Kroll could read that their study had
‘no intellectual anchor beyond an imagined picture of early hominid life’ (Binford
in Bunn and Kroll 1986: 446). Freeman, who had denounced Binford’s ‘complex
logical gymnastics’, was replied with the assertion that his argument rested on
‘many tenuous, and unexamined premises’, as well as ‘the use of nonfacts’ (Binford
1983c: 84-5). Hodder’s Reading the Past, ‘a little book with a little message being
blown through a large horn with a loud noise’, was ‘packed with contradictions,
misrepresentations, and distortions’: ‘Holy-moley, Hodder,’ Binford exclaimed,
‘you have just discovered science through Collingwood!’ (Binford 1988b: 875-6).
Finally, Gould was told that he advocated ‘very outdated positions’, that he was
‘strangely combining philosophies’, that his writing was ‘opaque and hard to follow’, his presentation ‘frequently illogical and philosophically “innocent” ’ and
‘his naivite’ ‘most interesting and unique’ (Binford 1985: 581, 584, 588), apart
from the more general point that ‘his nonparticipation in science’ resulted from
the fact that his arguments were ‘self-serving, misleading, confusing, and generally invalid’ (Binford 1989: 114, 117). Gould reproached Binford for frequently
using the argumentum ad hominem (Gould 1985: 643), but Binford bluntly replied that Gould’s claims were often examples of the argumentum ad ignorantiam
(Binford 1989: 111). The list could be easily expanded but there is no need to do
so. Though such polemics render the task of the historian of science somewhat
more juicy than it normally is, the systematic uttering of such devastating criticisms by the archaeologist who was commonly respected as the instigator of the
New Archaeology left an ambivalent impact on the discipline. Gould believed that
it would be unfortunate if such virulent polemics became ‘the role-model for the
conduct of such debates’ (1985: 644):
The tone of Binford’s recent responses to my work is reminiscent of the robber
barons of recent American business history who vigorously argued for unrestrained
free enterprise and competition but who did their utmost to build monopolies.
On the one hand, he reiterates the position that constant critical evaluation of
theories and assumptions is needed [...] yet, when one is critical, even indirectly
of Binford’s position, the response is that one is being “hostile,” “self-serving,” or
“misleading,” that one is creating “misguided debates” and “distortions,” to mention but a few of the pejorative terms applied whenever there is disagreement over
our paradigms. (Gould 1985: 643)

Of course, the role of critical debate, even hostile controversy, is often a very
productive one in the development of science—Binford’s own work of the 1960s
and 70s is a case in point—but in the context of a highly technical debate where
evidence remained ambiguous (and tampering hard to detect) such polemical
slaying tended to become counterproductive: at best, it gave the archaeological
community the impression that the problems in ethnoarchaeology were far from
being solved and remained utterly complex; at worst, it led to a weariness and

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despondency about ethnoarchaeology because nothing, it seemed, could be done
well. This applies especially to the field of faunal analysis with its multiple ‘bones
of contention’ (Lewin 1997), but it was equally true of the controversial study
of site structure before Whitelaw presented his synthesis, seen and approved by
Binford. Whereas Binford’s earlier writings had opened up entirely new vistas for
archaeological research, his overdefensive quarrels contributed to the isolation of
hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeology from more general theoretical themes. In the
late 1970s ethnoarchaeology of foraging societies stood at the heart of processual
debate; ten years later it had become a marginalized specialism where polemics
were abundant but results inconclusive.

Anthropological doubts about hunter-gatherers
The historicist debate in hunter-gatherer anthropology also affected, albeit in an
indirect way, the ethnoarchaeology of contemporary foragers. Ten years after the
Man the Hunter conference, the French anthropologist Maurice Godelier convened a meeting in Paris to discuss the current state of hunter-gatherer research.
It was the start of a profound revision of the Man the Hunter image, especially as
it had been promulgated by the Kalahari research project of Richard Lee and his
Harvard team: modern hunter-gatherers were no longer said to live in pure isolation, to subsist exclusively on foraging and to represent a timeless form of ecological adaptation (Bird-David 1988). Instead, the alternative image that emerged
from this critique was that modern foragers had for centuries, if not millennia,
been in contact with neighbouring pastoral and agricultural, and later even colonial and industrial societies and that these contacts had had a profound impact
on the hunting-gathering way of life. The !Kung Bushmen could not be understood without taking into account their long-standing contacts with Bantu-pastoralists and their involvement with mining-industry in Namibia, Botswana and
South-Africa. There were no longer hunters living strictly in a world of hunters
and the idea of the pristine, pure, authentic, unaffected, unspoiled, and timeless
forager was shown to be a Rousseau-like cliché that had crept into the functionalist discourse of 1960s and 70s cultural anthropology. Several anthropologists even
questioned the validity of ‘hunter-gatherers’ as a distinct category and abandoned
such generalizing concept altogether (Barnard 1983; Myers, 1988). This alternative interpretation of modern foragers was in the first place given in by a theoretical redefinition (though it was supported by new ethnohistorical evidence):
against the functionalist anthropologies like neo-evolutionism (Service, Steward),
cultural ecology (Lee), and cultural materialism (Harris) with their common focus on the social and economic structures of individual societies in their ecological surroundings, now in the context of structural-Marxist thought where world
systems theory and core-periphery ideas were high on the agenda more attention
was given to the historical importance of intersocietal contacts. In the same year
of the Paris conference, Martin Wobst (1978) criticized the isolationist, parochial
focus of hunter-gatherer research and Eric Wolf (1978) published his magnum
opus: Europe and the People without History, both urging that so-called timeless,
primitive societies be understood in historical terms of economic transactions and

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political dominance. In more than one sense, the dissatisfaction with functionalism which was said to be ‘ahistorical rather than antihistorical’ (Schrire 1984b:
1) and the call for a fuller appreciation of history echoed Boas’ critique against
evolutionism and his insistence on the necessity of historical understanding in
anthropology.
The historicist or revisionist debate became the key controversy of huntergatherer anthropology in the 1980s and early 1990s. At regular meetings anthropologists and ethnohistorians explored the role of contact, encapsulation,
acculturation in the history of today’s foraging societies (cf. Leacock and Lee
1982; Schrire 1984a; Ingold, Riches and Woodburn 1988). Journals like Current
Anthropology and Anthropology Today published numerous articles on the debate
(e.g. Testart 1988; Headland and Reid 1989; Solway and Lee 1990; Wilmsen and
Denbow 1990; Lee and Guenther 1991; Ingold 1992; Stiles 1992; Shnirelman
1994) and the synopses of contemporary debates presented by the Annual Review
of Anthropology came back to it several times (Barnard 1983; Bettinger 1987;
Myers 1988). It became bon ton to despise the term ‘pristine’ and to stress historical interaction, although the extent to which acculturation had taken place
was often harder to assess (Woodburn 1988). Throughout, the Kalahari debate
remained the most contentious zone of disagreement: in 1992 Alan Barnard compiled a bibliographical essay on the theme, listing nearly 600 sources related to the
debate (Barnard 1992).
Considering the zeal and energy devoted to this theme, the question must be
asked as to how historical revisionism afflicted hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeology.
Time and again, historical revisionists claimed that, considering the profound
impact of historical exchange and interaction, modern foragers could not be used
as living stand-ins for the remote evolutionary past, a warning comparable to the
Duke of Argyll’s position in the 1860s. Still in 1989 two anthropologists found it
necessary to criticize the idea that ‘tribal peoples, and especially nomadic foragers,
are often described as “fossilized” remnants of isolated late Paleolithic huntergatherers who have just emerged, through recent contact, into the 20th century’
(Headland and Reid 1989: 43). Although at first sight this seemed to invalidate
the ambition of ethnoarchaeology, it cannot be forgotten that ethnoarchaeology
had incorporated this very idea into one of its axioms. It was precisely because
nineteenth-century-like ethnographic projections were to be avoided that ethnoarchaeology sought alternative ways of looking at contemporary foragers; it was
precisely because ethnoarchaeologists were aware of a discrepancy between source
and target that concentration shifted from studying similarity to studying causality. Modern ethnoarchaeology was not justified ‘to the extent that past forms persist in the present’ (Ingold 1992: 793).
The historicist debate, therefore, was more endemic to social and cultural
anthro­pology proper than it was to archaeology. At the Man the Hunter conference, archaeologists and anthropologists had been overtly communicating with each other; but at the Paris meeting ten years later (and other subsequent meetings), archaeologists were notably absent (Bender and Morris 1988:
6). It was Lee’s (1979) cultural ecology of the !Kung that came under fire, not

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Yellen’s (1977) ethnoarchaeology of them. In fact, the names of Yellen, Binford,
Gould, O’Connell and others hardly, if ever, popped up in the revisionist papers. No matter how legitimate historical revisionism in anthropology was, it did
not directly apply to hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeology because individuals like
Binford and O’Connell had rarely needed the assumption that they were working
in pristine foraging contexts: at least in terms of material culture, the presence of
imported items like rifles, sardine cans, pop cans, sheets of corrugated iron and
second-hand cars was acknowledged in text, tables and photographs. And even
if there lingered a tendency to describe Nunamiut and Alyawara subsistence and
social system in terms of self-sufficient, autarkic foraging adaptations (Binford’s
(1980) ideal-typical distinction between collectors and foragers was largely a universalized reification of the historically contingent subsistence strategies observed
among the !Kung and the Nunamiut), the historicist critique did not fundamentally alter their perception because in general ethnoarchaeologists were not looking for living relics of past socio-economic forms but were simply interested in the
modern workings of a cultural system, regardless of whether it was pristine. To the
revisionist critique formulated by Headland and Reid, the archaeological reply in
Current Anthropology was: ‘While the ethnographic record is in itself clearly not
an archive of earlier evolutionary forms, it can be used as an arena within which
to investigate organizational relationships among sets of variables relevant to the
formulation of models for prehistoric situations’ (Hutterer in Headland and Reid
1989: 57).
If the historicist debate affected ethnoarchaeology, it happened at best indirectly by sweeping away the anthropological ground from which processual archaeology had sprung. Had hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeology once been flanked
and buttressed by neo-evolutionist and functionalist anthropology, the damning
critique against the latter turned ethnoarchaeology into an orphaned province
within archaeology. Ethnoarchaeological work with the !Kung became much less
prestigious the moment Lee’s cultural ecology was despised. So when the historicist debate did not aim its arrows at ethnoarchaeology, it nonetheless contributed
to the process of isolation that was already set in motion by ethnoarchaeology’s
internal difficulties. Too technical, too restrictive and too polemical, hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeology was now further deprived of the patronage of anthropology
from which it had so long benefited.

Contextual ethnoarchaeology 24
Granted that structural-Marxist anthropology contributed only indirectly to the
decline of hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeology, it affected the archaeology much
more immediately by inspiring a number of mostly British scholars in the early
1980s who turned its theoretical bases into a full-blown critique of processual
archaeology. A Marxist interest had been present in North-American scholarship
for a long time, particularly in the work of individuals like Bruce Trigger, Thomas
Patterson and Mark Leone, but lacking a coordinated effort, it did never overthrow
24 This and the following section were reworked into a separate article (Van Reybrouck 2000).

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the deeply-entrenched functionalist orthodoxy. In Britain, however, processual
archaeology had always taken a somewhat less extreme form than on the other
side of the Atlantic.25 David Clarke’s Analytical Archaeology, the key text for the
British pendant of the New Archaeology, systematized rather than criticized the
workings of culture-historical archaeology. Colin Renfrew, though clearly inspired
by American developments, avoided ecological determinism through his emphasis on issues of social archaeology in later British prehistory. The adaptationist,
hyperfunctionalist, and nomothetic strands of processual archaeology were attenuated in the British context where the New Archaeology’s largest impact was
made in the development of explicit theory (see Clarke’s work on systems theory
and model building) and better methodology (see Renfrew’s work on radiocarbon
dating and Clarke’s work on spatial analysis). Taken together with David Clarke’s
early death and the longevity and continuing influence of scholars of the older
generation (Grahame Clark, Glyn Daniel, Stuart Piggott), the British version of
processualism was considerably less dogmatic and less consolidated than its overseas variant.26 A younger generation of researchers could, therefore, start to develop alternative perspectives by associating themselves with the previous tradition
of humanistic archaeological scholarship. Hodder said: ‘Writers such as Childe,
Clark, Daniel and Piggott placed a similar emphasis on archaeology as an historical discipline, they eschewed cross-cultural laws, and they saw material items as
being structured by more than functional necessities’ (Hodder 1982d: 11).
Another influential source of inspiration came from London-based archaeologists like Barbara Bender and Mike Rowlands whose contacts with anthropologists had already given rise to an important interest in structural-Marxism.
Unlike the North-American Marxists, the efforts of these British critics of processualism were well coordinated: they were centred in one place (Cambridge,
and to a lesser extent London), they had a forum for discussion (the series New
Directions in Archaeology at Cambridge University Press), and they had a generally
acknowledged spokesperson (Ian Hodder).27 Hodder, one of Clarke’s former students, had originally undertaken research in model-building, spatial analysis and
computer applications but started to criticize systems theory and the dominant
25 British processual archaeology also converged with the older functionalist approach. Grahame
Clark’s student Eric Higgs promulgated the study of ecological archaeology to an entire generation
of students who had also sympathy with processual ideas. The New Archaeology’s stress on ecology
was in fact already responded to in the British tradition.
26 The relative flexibility of British processualism is also clear from the fact that some of its initial
adherents such as Richard Bradley could fairly easily integrate elements from the contextual and
post-processual programme. Indeed, the emphasis on the social subsystem eased the acceptance of
an alternative perspective of social, symbolic and ideational archaeology. Renfrew’s recent cognitive-processual archaeology, too, resulted from combining processual and post-processual strands,
whereas Hodder originally started as a processualist working on spatial archaeology and computer
simulations.
27 Most, if not all, post-processual volumes were published by Cambridge University Press. Between
1982 and 1987, the series New Directions in Archaeology published five edited volumes, all of
which were essential in the development and dissemination of structural-Marxist and post-processual thought: Symbolic and Structural Archaeology (Hodder 1982c), Ideology, Power and Prehistory
(Miller and Tilley 1984), Marxist Perspectives in Archaeology (Spriggs 1984), Archaeology as LongTerm History (Hodder 1987a), and The Archaeology of Contextual Meanings (Hodder 1987b).

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functionalism in a series of books and articles from the late 1970s on. His article ‘Theoretical archaeology: a reactionary view’ (Hodder 1982d) served as a
similar call to arms as Binford’s ‘Archaeology as anthropology’ written exactly
twenty years earlier: Hodder was soon supported by authors like Daniel Miller,
Christopher Tilley, Mike Parker Pearson and Henrietta Moore. Originally nameless, this counter-movement came to be labelled as ‘symbolic and structural archaeology’, later as ‘contextual archaeology’ and finally as ‘post-processual archaeology’, a name vague enough to shelter the variety of family-related approaches
which had emerged since the incipience of the anti-processual critique.

Theoretical inspirations
Structuralism, structural-Marxism, structuration theory, neo-Marxism, critical
theory, the sources of inspiration for this alternative form of archaeology were
rather numerous. Whereas initially such external borrowing from sociology, anthropology and philosophy was beneficial to find a way out of the functionalist
deadlock, in later phases it became downright fashionable to optimally forage the
library bookshelves for social theory, literary criticism and continental philosophy
that substantiated, or at least flanked, the archaeological claim (Van Reybrouck
1996; Murray 1996). During the earliest phase of contextual thought, two ranges
of perspectives from the social sciences were particularly influential: structuralism and Marxism which, albeit both in a rather mitigated fashion, gave rise to
two basic tenets, i.e. the ‘meaningful constitution’ and the ‘active role’ of material
culture. From structuralism came the interest in mental and ideational aspects of
societies and, more particularly, the idea that a society’s cultural norms and values are not just reflected in thought and language but also in settlement layout,
house architecture, cooking, bodily decoration, and so on. Material culture was,
therefore, not simply an expression of functionalist necessities and extra-somatic
adaptations but could be seen as ‘meaningfully constituted’, a point repeatedly
stressed by Hodder (1982b: 218; 1982d: 13). Close to structuralist linguistics
(De Saussure) and anthropology (Lévi-Strauss, Turner, Douglas), it was believed
that meaning of a sign emerged not so much by external reference to a semantic
signified, but by internal contrast and opposition to others signifiers. Geometric
decorations on a pot were not to be translated in what they represented from the
real world, but in how they interacted with decorations on other material items.
Dirt was not an intrinsic property of an object, but determined by its structural
relations in human categorization. Hodder, however, was wary of the rigidity of
Lévi-Straussian structuralism as it left little room for historical change and individual agency. He therefore embraced the nascent field of structuration theory, a
modified form of structuralism advocated by Bourdieu and Giddens who argued
that structures were not just silently and obediently reproduced by social actors,
but simultaneously produced and modified through individual action. Hodder’s
structuralist work was not just about symbols, but about ‘symbols in action’
(1982b). This greater emphasis on human agency, individual knowledgeability,
and personal negotiation enabled to make a bridge to neo-Marxist thought.

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Through the work of French anthropologists, particularly Godelier, Marxist
thought with its traditional focus on infrastructural themes like economy, technology and social relations of production had been enriched to incorporate a fuller understanding of power and ideology. Ideology, neo-Marxists argued, could not
just be seen as a superstructural mask for the underlying social realities but was,
certainly in pre-capitalist societies, closely entwined with the mode of production;
more than blatant false consciousness, ideology and power had to be understood
as inherent forces operative in all forms of social action (an idea that was further
supported by the historiographical work of Foucault). According to this view, material culture did not just belong to the forces of the socio-economic infrastructure
but played a role in ideological and power-related strategies as well. At a nondiscursive and nonverbal level, material culture served to legitimate and manipulate
social reality. Although Hodder aligned himself more closely to structuralism than
to neo-Marxism, archaeologists like Miller and Parker Pearson further elaborated his important notion of ‘the active role of material culture’ (Hodder 1982b:
228). This catchphrase betrayed a crucial rupture with preceding archaeological thought. Material culture was no longer simply a mirror of social action, but
equally an instrument of it, that is, like language, it could be used to communicate
and negotiate, to challenge and change the given social order. Material culture
could be appropriated by individuals in their strategies of self-representation and
social action. ‘Material culture patterning transforms structurally rather than reflects behaviourally social relations’ (Hodder 1982b: 218). Such conceptualization
of material culture was diametrically opposed to the reflectionist theory of processual archaeology: material statics had now an inherent dynamic potential.
Despite all later additions and external borrowings, it was the structuralMarxist legacy which provided the two pillars of subsequent post-processual
thought. It resulted in a comprehensively new view of material culture as a realm
of sociocultural practice imbued with ideational and ideological meaning that
could be drawn upon in social action. True to Spinoza’s dictum omnis determinatio
negatio est, contextual archaeology thus defined itself in opposition to the axioms
of processualism, just like the New Archaeology before had been a counter-stand
against culture-historical archaeology. Though the range of ideas was broad, textbooks and reviews generally enumerate following contrasts with the processual
paradigm as the movement’s basic tenets (Renfrew and Bahn 1991; Dark 1995):
its philosophy of science was less realist, less objectivist, less positivist but more
inclined towards idealism, subjectivism and constructivism; in terms of explanation, it criticized logical proof in favour of historical understanding; it was more
affiliated with history than with functionalist anthropology (although at first it
derived many of its ideas from structural-Marxist anthropology); substantially,
it urged to take the upper rings of Hawkes’ ladder of inference seriously, rather
than to reduce them to the lower ones as had too often been the case with processual work; it emphasized ideational aspects of material culture besides functional
ones; it urged that material culture was meaningfully constituted in that it reflected norms and values held by the members of a society; it stressed the role of
individual agency and freedom against the view of a collectivist, adaptationist,

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ecologically-steered form of human action; it argued for an active role of material culture rather than it being a passive reflection of social reality; in terms of
archaeological writing, it preferred literary style over scientistic jargon, narrative
prose over sterile logic, metaphor over method.

A new ethnoarchaeological enthusiasm
How was the attitude towards ethnoarchaeology? Considering the drastic contraposition against all processual premises, one would expect that a field which
was once the hallmark of archaeological functionalism be immediately repudiated
by the young critics. Indeed, reviews of the theoretical debate of the last decades
often keep silent about such a thing like ‘contextual ethnoarchaeology’ (Renfrew
and Bahn 1991; Dark 1995; Shanks and Hodder 1995), giving the impression
that the whole field was rejected in the early 1980s along with other processual
themes like formation processes, optimal foraging theory, site catchment analysis,
and so on.28 Nothing could be less true, though. Even if in more recent years postprocessual writers have dispelled the term ‘ethnoarchaeology’ from their vocabulary, this obliterates the quintessential role ethnoarchaeology has played in the
early phases of contextual archaeology. Consider the corpus of foundational texts,
monographs and edited volumes alike, published in the first five years of contextual thought: Hodder’s three 1982 volumes The Present Past (1982a), Symbols
in Action (1982b), and Symbolic and Structural Archaeology (1982c), Miller and
Tilley’s Ideology, Power and Prehistory (1984), Miller’s Artefacts as Categories
(1985), Moore’s Space, Text and Gender (1986), Hodder’s Reading the Past (1986),
his edited volumes Archaeology as Long-Term History (1987a) and The Archaeology
of Contextual Meanings (1987b), and Shanks and Tilley’s ‘black and red’ volumes
Re-Constructing Archaeology (1987a) and Social Theory and Archaeology (1987b).
Now, all these volumes, as is well known, incorporated to a greater or lesser extent
a critique of the methods and principles of processual archaeology. Surprisingly
however, and this is a point which has often been overlooked, ethnoarchaeology
was never under fire. On the contrary, all contextual archaeologists had at one
stage or another been involved with ethnoarchaeological research: Hodder studied
decorative symbolism on pots, stools and persons among the Baringo pastoralists in Kenya (1982b; 1986: 107-20); Miller investigated the social and technological categories underlying Dangwara pottery in India (Miller 1985); Moore
worked on settlement layout and refuse disposal with the Marakwet in Kenya
(Moore 1986). Furthermore, Hodder (1982a: 215-6) drew attention to the material culture items appropriated by punks, Shanks and Tilley (1987a: 172-240)
studied differences in design between Swedish and British beer cans and Miller
(1984) analysed contemporary suburban architecture in Britain. The industrialized world was thus equally considered a promising field for material culture studies. On top of that, the volumes edited by Hodder (1982c, 1987a and 1987b) and
28 The term ‘contextual ethnoarchaeology’ never gained a wide currency after it was originally suggested by Hodder (1982d: 13). I will use it to designate the ethnoarchaeological studies conducted
by Hodder and his students in early and mid-1980s.

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Miller and Tilley (1984) all contained parts devoted to studies in ethnoarchaeology, ethnohistory and modern material culture. An archaeological approach to
the present, then, was a very popular theme within early contextual work. In fact,
in Britain a genuine interest for ethnoarchaeology was only launched with the
rise of contextual archaeology. Unlike the close affinity between ethnoarchaeology and processualism in North-America during the 1970s, British processualists
had only rarely shown much interest in actively undertaken ethnoarchaeological fieldwork.29 The importance of ethnoarchaeology was only appreciated in the
context of an emerging contextual approach; Hodder wrote that because so little
was known about the place of material culture in daily practice, the role of ideology, the discursive and non-discursive dimensions of material symbolization, ‘the
main response to the new questions has naturally been to turn to ethnoarchaeology’ (1982d: 14). If British ethnoarchaeology was largely contextual, contextual
archaeology was also largely ethnoarchaeological. The first major monographs resulting from this theoretical upheaval were all ethnoarchaeological studies (Hodder
1982b; Miller 1985; Moore 1986); it would take several additional years before
the first substantial book-length treatment on an archaeological problem would
appear, which was arguably Hodder’s Domestication of Europe from 1990.
Though ethnoarchaeology was far from being abandoned by contextual
archaeolo­gists, its emphases were quite different from the work conducted in a
processual framework. First, the emphasis was no longer on the few surviving
hunter-gatherers in arid and arctic environments, but on societies of pastoralists and agriculturalists, often in East-Africa where metallurgy was known, which
showed varying degrees of exposition to the Western world.30 This change of subject matter was closely paralleled by a shift from a research interest in Palaeolithic
archaeology to one in more recent phases of European prehistory (Neolithic,
Bronze Age, Iron Age). Concomitantly, the attention to archaeological site formation processes in terms of site structure and faunal assemblages was replaced by an
emphasis on the active role and symbolism of pottery, vernacular architecture, and
refuse disposal. More than developing ‘cross-cultural predictive laws or generalisations [...] for these mechanical constraints on human behaviour’ alone, ‘the role
of ethnoarchaeology must also be to define the relevant cultural context for social
and ecological behaviour’ (Hodder 1982d: 5). There was also a change in methodology: whereas processual ethnoarchaeology could in principle suffice with observing human behaviour and measuring variables often considered curious and
trivial by the people under study, long-term participation, inside knowledge and
29 If there had been an interest in ethnography, it never entailed ethnoarchaeological fieldwork. David
Clarke, as indicated above, used the results from Bantu ethnography to question the archaeological
culture concept. Colin Renfrew worked with social-anthropological notions like a-cephalous societies, ‘big men’, bands and tribes to explain late-prehistoric Britain, but this did not entail ethnoarchaeological expeditions to Melanesia and Polynesia (where such concepts had been developed by
anthropologists like Sahlins).
30 I am fully aware of the existence of a range of processual ethnoarchaeology that was not focused
on hunter-gatherers like the work on rural settlements in Iran (Kramer 1982; Watson 1979b) and
ceramic practices in the Philippines (Longacre 1991; Longacre and Skibo 1994). However, huntergatherer studies belonged to the realm where ethnoarchaeology was processualism par excellence.

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historical analysis were deemed indispensable by the contextual archaeologists
(Hodder 1986: 108). This implied a shift from the outside to the inside, from an
etic to an emic perspective, from observing to participating, from explaining site
formation to interpreting material culture. Yet all these differences can only be
understood if one appreciates the radically different function contextual archaeologists accorded to studying the contemporary world. Indeed, ethnoarchaeology
no longer served to unravel the relevant causes that had formed the archaeological
record, but to indicate general principles regarding the role of material culture in
social practice. Processual ethnoarchaeology, with its emphasis on middle-range
research and actualistic studies, had been largely methodological; contextual ethnoarchaeology was largely theoretical. Whereas processual ethnoarchaeology had
increasingly shunned issues of general theory, entrenching itself in all sorts of
technicalities, contextual archaeology used ethnographic studies to explore, develop, and disseminate a range of alternative perspectives on material culture.
This can best be illustrated with two examples. Hodder’s (1982b) classical research in the Baringo district, Kenya, originally started with the hope to see what
archaeological cultures could have meant in reality, comparable to how his mentor
David Clarke had used Bantu ethnography to argue that archaeological cultures
do not represent ethnic identities.31 Hodder soon found out that ethnic entities
did not necessarily correlate with a recurrent set of artefacts nor that increased interaction between two ethnic groups led to increased stylistic similarity. Quite on
the contrary, he noted that intercultural interaction might rather fortify stylistic
differences; in contact zones, material culture was apparently appropriated to affirm ethnic identity and affiliation (figure 13). This awareness of how individuals
could negotiate their social positions through material strategies led Hodder to
study other boundaries which crosscut strictly ethnic ones. He observed that material culture played an equally important role in policing age and sex boundaries
when young men used age-related spears and women specific forms of calabashes
to challenge the authority of elder men. Material culture patterning was more
than a ‘predictable reflection of human behaviour’; it entailed ‘ideological manipulation of material items in social and ecological strategies’ (Hodder 1982b:
11, 229). Yet more than an instrument of identity bargaining and manipulation,
Hodder argued that all aspects of material culture and related social practice were
manifestations of a same underlying, symbolic scheme: a cultural logic based on
binary oppositions like pure versus dirt, and insider versus outsider (which betrays Hodder’s indebtedness to the British school of structuralism, in particular
the work of Mary Douglas and Victor Turner). Active role of material culture and
meaningful constitution of it, ethnoarchaeology was instrumental in laying the
bases of contextual thought. For Hodder ethnoarchaeology was meant to show

31 At that point in his intellectual development Hodder was still strongly inspired by David Clarke:
his ethnoarchaeological work initially started to criticize the basic premise of Childean culture-historical archaeology (i.e. the assumption that archaeological cultures represented ethnic identities).
Only after Clarke’s death did it develop into a critique of the reflectionist assumption of processual
archaeology (Hodder 1981).

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‘how structures of meaning relate to practice — how symbol sets are negotiated
and manipulated in social action’ (1982b: 214).
The same holds true for Mike Parker Pearson’s (1982) study of mortuary behaviour, even if it dealt with the industrialized world. He argued that mortuary
practices in Victorian and modern Britain had to be understood by the interplay
of ideational structures in terms of purity and danger with ideological strategies of
social display. Whereas in the nineteenth century, elaborate tomb architecture and
other forms of wealth display served as forms of social advertisement, the sobriety
of twentieth-century graves and the growing popularity of cremation reflected
the increasing impact of hygiene, as dictated by science and medicine, on social
practice. Not only did the structural logic undergo a profound transformation
and redefinition, the role of material culture as identity-marker did too. Parker
Pearson’s study was exemplary of the early contextual archaeology in that it used a
contemporary context, even from an urban setting, to develop and communicate
novel theoretical insights about the interplay of structuralist and Marxist principles in material culture practice.

The problematic place of analogy
Clearly, studying Kenyan calabash design and Victorian tomb architecture is quite
another form of ethnoarchaeology than quantifying the number of broken reindeer metatarsals at an Inuit site. Far away from the aspirations of middle-range
theory, for Hodder and his students ethnoarchaeology was essential in discovering, developing and disseminating the basic tenets of contextual archaeology as
an alternative to mainstream processual thought. Just like people in the Baringo
district used material culture to express ethnic identity and difference, contextual
archaeologists used material culture studies to express divergence from functionalism and affiliation with structural-Marxism. Predictably, the role of analogy was a
rather different one. Hodder originally embraced Wylie’s measures for improving
the argument by analogy: The Present Past, his programmatic exposé on ethnoarchaeology (1982a: 16-27), reiterated her call for relational analogies that are based
on relevant similarities across a number of different sources instead of listing formal similarities in the belief that testing or falsification will be enough. However,
Hodder never put this call into practice.32 The awareness of causality, Wylie asked
for, was immediately invalidated by Hodder when he said that ‘there can be no
simple functional links’ in the source of the analogy (1982a: 24). Wylie asked for
causes, Hodder said they could not be found: ‘We see that there can be no universal cultural relationship between statics and dynamics, because the historically
32 Later, in Reading the Past, Hodder (1986: 148-9) suggested that the argument by analogy which
assesses the relevance of similarities and differences was ‘simply another instance of the general [contextual] approach already outlined’: the interpretation of meaning through the contextual method
he advocated would also have worked from determining the similarities and differences between
archaeological objects. It seems, however, that Hodder has been misled here by the identity of
the terms ‘similarity’ and ‘difference’ used, because the analogical method, unlike the contextual
method, required an understanding of causality and an assumption of uniformitarianism, issues that
were not covered by the contextual approach.

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Figure 13. Hodder used ethnoarchaeology to investigate the active role of material culture.
Calabash designs in the Baringo area of Kenya increased with cultural contact between different ethnic groups. Interaction did not result in stylistic homogenization, but in differentation.
Material culture was more than a reflection of the social order (Hodder 1982b: figure 37)

contextual structuring principles intervene’ (Hodder 1986, 120). And even if such
particular historical contexts could in principle still supply relational analogies,
the idea of ‘causal certainty’ was replaced by a vaguer notion of ‘potential connection’ (Holtorf 2000).
Despite Hodder’s initial wish to reconcile an ideographic approach with a reliance on analogy (1982d: 13), the particularist emphasis on attitudes, concepts,
values and ideas undermined the possibility of drawing relational analogies in
the sense Wylie suggested. Not only was the uniformitarian assumption between
source and target analogue unsubstantiated, the internal links within the source
were never unambiguous or sufficiently causal to support an analogy. Even if
the active role of material culture could reverse the causality arrow because the
archaeological statics were now (to some extent at least) the causing agent of cultural dynamics, this did not ease the drawing of analogical inferences.33 In general,
however, such inverse causality strengthens the analogy (Wylie 1982): because the
antecedent (the determining cause of behaviour) is known for both the source
and target (present and prehistoric material culture), the problem of equifinality
33 Binford (1989: 30) rightly observed that in contextual and post-processual thought ‘there is no difference between the static and dynamic worlds, contrary to what most who have seriously addressed
the problem of formation processes for the archaeological record have clearly suggested.’

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is minimal (the trouble that a same pattern can have different causes). It is much
easier to reason from cause to consequence than vice versa. Yet this was not the
case with contextual ethnoarchaeology. The principle of the active role of material culture was not so much about inverted causality as it was about the absence
of clear-cut causality. It did not state that material culture steered or dictated
social action, but that it could be used as an instrument of social negotiation. It
was not about material culture as the causing agent, but about a role bestowed
upon it by human actors. Material culture did not act out of itself (apart from
the consequences unintended by the one who used material culture as non-verbal
discourse), it played a role written and directed by knowledgeable human beings—and these were still quite absent from the archaeological record. With the
decline of the reflectionist view of material culture, causality evaporated from the
ethnoarchaeological discussion: as a mirror, material culture could reflect only one
reality; as an instrument, however, it could play very different tunes.
Now that understanding causality was no longer within the grasp, contextual
archaeologists often slid back into an older and weaker form of analogical reasoning, i.e. the use of observed but unexplained cross-cultural similarities in the
source as a basis for making predictions about the past. The method essentially
went back to the nomothetic endeavours of Schiffer c.s. in the 1970s and it is perhaps because of this processual smack that contextual ethnoarchaeologists injected
it always tacitly. For example, in studying Neolithic long houses, Hodder reasoned
from the cross-cultural hypothesis that ‘in small-scale lineage-based societies in
which the major concern is to increase labour power, the control of women by
men and the negotiation of position by women will become the dominant feature of social relations and will often involve cultural elaboration of the domestic
sphere’ (1984: 61). Although he warned against placing ‘much reliance on these
ethnographic analogies without a careful consideration of the contexts involved’,
he found ‘the widespread relationship’ between the varying elaboration of houses and the varying position of women to be ‘suggestive’ (62); indeed, it even
formed the backbone of his entire argument. It was a downright cross-cultural
analogy: the observed similarity (‘elaborated houses’) led to a predicted similarity (‘female negotiation’) on the basis of a cross-cultural linkage between the two
in the present. Shanks and Tilley, though generally wary of ‘the sledge hammer
of cross-cultural generalization’ (1987a: 95), relied on such an argument in their
study of southern Swedish middle Neolithic ceramics when they wrote that ‘in
small-scale “traditional” societies in which artistic production is highly ritualized,
little room is left for individual expression or innovation in form or the introduction of new or radical content’ (1987b: 163). Contrary to what they pretended,
they were not ‘eschewing cross-cultural generalization with its resultant problems
of lack of explanation of specific features of material culture’ (1987a: 113). On
top of that, the structural-Marxist underpinnings encouraged a cross-cultural perspective: Hodder insisted that even if every cultural context was unique, ‘universal principles of meaning’ existed (1986: 127). Contextual archaeology had to
reconcile the specific with the general: ‘each particular historical context must be
studied as a unique combination of general principles of meaning and symbolism,

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negotiated and manipulated in specific ways’ (Hodder 1982b: 218). In practice
this came down to covertly using cross-cultural generalization while overtly despising them.
The discrepancy between the finicky scrutiny of processual ethnoarchaeologists in the 1980s and the sweeping claims of the contextual scholars was so large
that discussion between them remained absent. Binford’s (1989: 27-71) predictable and multifarious attacks against the post-processualists did hardly, if ever,
touch upon the problem of ethnoarchaeology and analogical reasoning. Hodder
was one of the rare authors to address the problem more explicitly. In Reading the
Past (1986: 107-20), he questioned the validity of processual actualistic research:
While the idea of Middle Range Theory in relation to physical processes (e.g.
decay of C14) is feasible, it is difficult to see how there can ever be universal laws
of cultural process which are independent of one’s higher-level cultural theories.
(Hodder 1986: 107)

Considering the uniqueness of cultural norms and values, Hodder suggested that
ethnoarchaeologists should incorporate the methods of social and cultural anthropology rather than becoming a positivist discipline of physical processes and
mechanical causation. However, the question then emerged if there was still any
difference between such participatory ethnoarchaeology on the one hand and traditional anthropology on the other. ‘Should ethnoarchaeology not disappear, to
be replaced by or integrated with the anthropology of material culture and social
change?’ he wondered (108). Indeed, anthropology was already witnessing an increased interest in material culture so that ethnoarchaeology had perhaps only
been a ‘stop-gap’ or a ‘period piece’ invented by archaeologists at a time when
anthropology showed a lack of concern for material culture (108). According to
Hodder, ethnoarchaeological research might therefore ultimately be ‘associated
with the non-contextual, cross-cultural trends in the archaeological science of
the sixties and seventies’ (108). He believed that ‘whatever the long-term future’,
ethnoarchaeology would still ‘retain a role in the immediate future’ of the discipline (108). Hodder was right in doubting the longevity of ethnoarchaeology,
but that its expiry date would come so rapidly was even beyond his most realistic
expectations.

Post-processual archaeology
Hodder’s trust in the immediate future notwithstanding, the decline of ethnoarchaeology during the 1980s is probably nowhere better illustrated than in his own
list of publications. In 1982, the birth year of contextual archaeology, Hodder
published the results of his ethnoarchaeological fieldwork in Kenya in Symbols in
Action. At the very end of this book, there was a case study on settlements and
tombs in Neolithic Orkney which drew on the ethnoarchaeological insights of
symbolic codification. Hodder stressed that the development of a contextual archaeology depended ‘to a large extent on the further expansion of ethnoarchaeological investigations’ (1982b: 229). His 1984 study of Neolithic long houses in

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central Europe suggested that their organization of space was linked to female
negotiations of position through the internal arrangement of domestic space as
observed in East Africa and elsewhere (Hodder 1984). This was a direct transposition of ethnoarchaeological principles to prehistoric contexts. In subsequent
years, Hodder maintained a decided interest in ethnographic, ethnohistorical
and ethnoarchaeological studies (see his edited volumes from 1982c, 1987a and
1987b), but the feedback to prehistory was increasingly bracketed. His 1986 plea
to draw ethnoarchaeology closer to social anthropology ‘also militate[d] against
a “materialist”, “archaeological” ethnoarchaeology’ (1986: 107). Reading the Past,
therefore, marked the transition from contextual ethnoarchaeology to post-processual archaeology, that is, the transition from ethnoarchaeological enthusiasm to
epistemological scepticism. When in 1990 his Domestication of Europe appeared,
Hodder avoided any overt influence from previous ethnoarchaeology: ‘I do not
think that I consciously used the Nuba as an analogy,’ he said when discussing
the architectural ornamentation of Çatal Hüyük (1990: 5). An archaeological ethnoarchaeology, i.e. one that is directly relevant to the study of the past, thus disappeared from sight. To put it to the proof: in Theory and Practice in Archaeology,
Hodder’s collection of articles from the 1980s and early 1990s (Hodder 1992),
the term ‘ethnoarchaeology’ virtually disappeared from his writing during the second half of the 1980s. The rare cases it is mentioned after 1986 invariably belong
to contexts of critique and scepsis.
This gradual disappearance of ethnoarchaeology in Hodder’s writings was
not necessarily the cause for a wider phenomenon but quite symptomatic of it.
Indeed, the pattern observed was not restricted to the work of Ian Hodder alone.
Following his Domestication, the early 1990s testified to the publication of monographs like Julian Thomas’ Rethinking the Neolithic (1991) and John Barrett’s
Fragments from Antiquity (1994), works which clearly associated themselves with
the post-processual approach, which tried to shed new light on certain aspects of
later European and British prehistory, but which invariably eschewed the use of
ethnographic analogies and ethnoarchaeological conclusions. Though this omission, or rather, exclusion is rarely defended as a deliberate choice, the consistency
of the pattern makes it more than just accidental. Indeed, in none of these volumes does the word ‘ethnoarchaeology’ occur in the index. If a book’s index can
be seen as the shortest introduction to its intellectual idiom and key concepts, the
total absence of an ‘ethnoarchaeology’ entry reveals a marked change in the conceptual apparatus of post-processual scholarship. Though this omission, or rather,
exclusion is rarely defended as a deliberate choice, the consistency of the pattern
makes it more than accidental. Preucel and Hodder’s massive reader Contemporary
Theory in Archaeology (1996) was even entirely silent on ethnoarchaeology.

Rhetoric, theories, and politics
Three reasons must be taken into account to explain the shift from a contextual
ethnoarchaeology to a post-processual archaeology: a rhetorical, a theoretical, and
a political one. Firstly, once the axioms of contextual archaeology had been abundantly made clear through the studies of the living world, there was no longer a

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need to draw upon such ethnoarchaeological and modern material culture studies.
On the contrary, it was rhetorically injudicious to continue that indirect strategy
of theoretical exploration: those already convinced by the new approach did not
need any further examples from the present, while those still sceptical wanted to
see how such an alternative perspective might improve an understanding of the
past itself. Hodder opened The Archaeology of Contextual Meanings with often
heard critiques like ‘The approach cannot be applied’, ‘You can do such studies in
the present but not in the past’ which he replied fiercely with the ambitious promise: ‘The aim in this volume is to show that “it can be done” ’ (Hodder 1987b:
vii). Similarly, Tilley’s first lines in the preface of his edited volume Interpretative
Archaeology read:
One of a legion of criticisms directed against the recent emergence of a ‘post-processual’ archaeology has been that theoretical exposition dominates and it lacks
many clearly worked-out examples tackling archaeological data. Those given often
discuss contemporary rather than prehistoric material culture. The purpose of this
book is to address that ‘failure’ and provide a sense of excitement of carrying out
archaeological research in a new way [...]. The studies in it consist of detailed
explorations of the past. (Tilley 1993: ix)

To be a truly cogent alternative, compelling archaeological case-studies were needed instead of further ethnographic examples.
Secondly, the late 1980s had brought about a theoretical climate which, although heavily indebted to preceding contextual thought, implied fundamental changes in the appreciation of ethnoarchaeology. Put schematically, if contextual archaeology had borrowed many of its principles from structuralism and
neo-Marxism, post-processual archaeology found inspiration in hermeneutics
and post-structuralism. Whereas the former were traditions of anthropological
thought with an inherent cross-cultural perspective, the latter came from trends
in philosophy and literary criticism which emphasized alterity, difference and
uniqueness. Contextual archaeologists stretched structural-Marxist anthropology
to include ethnographic fieldwork with a consideration for material culture; postprocessualists focused more on the ‘reading’ of prehistoric ‘texts’ whereby interpretation proceeded without recourse to present parallels. Structural-Marxist explanation implied reference to general principles like class struggle, social display,
binary opposition and codic transformation; post-structural and hermeneutic approaches, on the other hand, preferred ongoing interpretation, creative empathy,
individual understanding, and open-endedness. Since ethnoarchaeology required
a minimum of cross-cultural comparison and a certain belief in the possibility
of generalization, its place became increasingly problematic in post-processual
discourse.34 The extreme particularism which resulted from this new theoretical
course limited the role of ethnoarchaeology: this could only show that material
34 An interesting point for a history of archaeological publishing is that the transition from contextual
to post-processual archaeology was accompanied by a shift from the somewhat austere bastion of
academic publishing, Cambridge University Press, to the more fashionable, post-modern fonds of
Routledge (and to a lesser extent Blackwell).

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culture played an active role, not which one; that it was socially constructed, not
how exactly in particular cases. Detailed contexts were thought to be so much determined by particularistic contexts and historical idiosyncrasies that analogy was
no longer of any practical use.
To the names of Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu, Giddens, Althusser and Godelier
were now added the ones of Ricoeur, Gadamer, Collingwood, Derrida, Barthes,
and Foucault. Hodder’s Reading the Past had already advocated a return to the
hermeneutic philosophy of Collingwood (1986: 95-101), Moore’s Space, Text and
Gender (1986) had relied in part on the critical hermeneutics of Ricoeur (1986:
80-4; cf. Moore 1990) but it was in particular Shanks and Tilley’s Re-Constructing
Archaeology, drawing upon the work of Gadamer, which steered the field into a
more hermeneutic course (1987a: 103-110). Hermeneutics, or the art of understanding, investigated what happened in the process of interpretation, in particular
of historical texts, but by extension of all forms of human communication, from
paintings and operas to dresses and gestures. One of its central insights, suggested
by Gadamer and explored by Ricoeur, was that meaning was not just passively
read off a text, but actively read into it. Meaning did not reside inside the text but
emerged at the interplay of it with the interpreter. This opened up numerous possibilities for the interpretation of so-called mute material culture; understanding
was no longer a process of unprejudiced decoding but involved a dialogue between the investigator’s frame of reference and the constraining evidence at hand.
(Shanks and Tilley’s writing, in fact, was further complicated because it drew as
much on hermeneutics as on critical theory, the one being a phenomenological
theory of interpretation, the other a crypto-Marxist theory of social praxis and
power. No matter how diverse and difficult to reconcile, these two philosophical
positions shared with each other a decided emphasis on the situated place of the
researcher in his or her own historical context—for Gadamer this formed no inhibition but the very condition for understanding, for Adorno and Horkheimer this
meant that scientific practice always implied social praxis in the present. Shanks
and Tilley argued that archaeological understanding of the past was inherently
conditioned by present circumstances but that it could and should at the same
time be accommodated to question the contemporary world.) The hermeneutic
perspective was further elaborated in books like Reading Material Culture (Tilley
1990), Material Culture and Text (Tilley 1991), Interpretative Archaeology (Tilley
1993), and Interpreting Archaeology (Hodder et al. 1995). Tilley’s work on Swedish
rock art showed how a structural-Marxist approach to material culture could be
combined with such a hermeneutic perspective (1991; cf. Kolen 1992).
Post-structuralism, largely inspired by the deconstructivist work of Derrida,
was explored in an edited volume called Archaeology after Structuralism (Bapty
and Yates 1990) and also in Reading Material Culture (Tilley 1990). Unlike
structuralists, post-structuralist thought refused to find immutable structures
underlying cultural expressions but focused on the endless play of semiotic referencing between signifiers. It advocated the absolute primacy of the text, the
author being decentred, the semantic anchor being lost: the signified, the actual
meaning of the sign, was bracketed in favour of the autonomy of the signifier.

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Thomas (1991: 4) said that there were no longer ‘fixed points of reference [...]
which might act as Ariadne’s thread to guide us through the labyrinth [...]. Now,
there is only the labyrinth.’ Interpretation was, therefore, fluid, uncertain, and ongoing. Although a consequent application of such deconstructivist paradigm led
to a self-effacing of archaeology itself (Yates 1990), post-structuralism made a decided impact on archaeology. It brought about the idea that material culture, to be
adequately understood, had not to be translated into a verbalized, codic, discursive meaning or ultimate signified but could be interpreted on the level of practical consciousness, non-discursive meaning, shifting signifiers and intrinsic material meaning (Hodder 1989). Hodder, in particular, was for a while seduced by
a mild form of post-structuralism (not the radical deconstructivism of Derrida):
his The Domestication of Europe (1990) was not just an interpretation of the Early
Neolithic in Europe, but also a literary and stylistic exercise which explicitly problematized the author-text-reader triad, which decentred the subject of the author
and questioned ‘whether there is anything of the ‘I’ in this book at all’ (x), and
which emphasized ‘structural indeterminacy’ and ‘interpretive uncertainty’ (279,
310) without becoming ‘a decontextualized post-modern pastiche’ (279).
Thirdly, there was a political reason, closely related to the above theoretical reorientation, which influenced the decline of ethnoarchaeology. The incorporation of this amalgam from philosophy, social theory and literary criticism
brought about a textual turn in archaeology: post-structuralism proclaimed the
absolute autonomy of the text, divorced from its author and open to multiple
readings (‘There is nothing outside the text,’ said Thomas (1991: 4); cf. Yates
1990); hermeneutics, on the other hand, used the reading of a (historical) text as
the paradigmatic example of all other forms of interpretation. The text metaphor
increasingly came to dominate archaeological discourse (Hodder 1989): material
culture was no longer defined as a meaningfully constituted instrument of social
negotiation but was now looked at in terms of a textual analogy, ‘as a discourse
that is always already written, which the investigator reads and then subsequently
rewrites and translates to produce his or her text’ (Tilley 1991: 180). Like a text,
material culture was not just bestowed with intentions but always open to novel
interpretation, both for past actors and for present scholars.
This contradicted earlier views on a number of essential points: Marxists and
structuralists had still been convinced that an adequate and ultimate understanding of the past was possible, even if this was never easy. ‘However “other” it seemed
at first,’ Hodder (1986: 127) had stated, ‘an evaluated approximation to understanding is feasible.’ Indeed, sufficient methodological rigour allowed to reach
the hidden meanings (structuralism) and hidden agendas (Marxism) of life in the
past. Archaeologists could thus situate themselves on a privileged, Archimedean
vantage point from where the mechanisms of symbolic codification and social
manipulation were intelligible. Post-structuralist and hermeneutic archaeologists,
on the other hand, agreed that the interpreter was always implicated in the process
of understanding, that he or she was inextricably bound up with the very act of
making sense of a text. Interpretation as an ongoing process was, therefore, never
fully accomplished, as every new signifier was related to other signifiers and as the

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hermeneutic circle could never be closed. Whereas contextual archaeology withheld an aftertaste of the positivist optimism in its study of ideational and ideological aspects, post-processual research worked with lesser degrees of epistemological
confidence.
It was in this context that post-modern issues of epistemic relativism, narrative
fragmentation, plurality of interpretation, and multiple readings of the evidence
were embraced—which led to a questioning of the legitimacy of the archaeological
discourse as the sole authoritative voice on the past, a critical study of archaeological praxis in the present, and an interest in alternative claims on heritage resources. Apart from a consideration of non-professional views at sites like Stonehenge
and feminist re-interpretations of the androcentric master narrative, this also entailed a greater attention to indigenous perspectives on the historical landscape
in the post-colonial context. Land claims made by Australian aboriginals, the demand for reburials by native Americans, ethnic protest in New Zealand against
the display of skeletal material in museums, all such cases showed the political
nature of archaeology. They re-shuffled the ‘us versus them’ dichotomy inherent in
much ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological reasoning. Anxious to respect the variety and uniqueness of cultural identities, post-processual archaeology eschewed
the search for cross-cultural regularities and other homogenizing tropes. Gosden
(1999: 9) has recently said that ethnoarchaeology is ‘immoral’. The particular,
the specific, the unique, the idiosyncratic, the contingent, this became the only
theoretically acceptable and politically correct field of research. If contemporary
non-industrialized societies were consulted, it was not so much to upholster archaeological constructs but to deconstruct the taken-for-granted dominance of
Western academic thought. Ethnoarchaeology, with its time-honoured cross-cultural ambition, could no longer function as a source of direct information:
Ethnoarchaeology must be kept at a discreet distance from archaeology as itself,
the inappropriateness of direct, cross-cultural, cross-temporal analogy (which of
course means the destabilising effect of an (ethno)archaeology of here and now)
requires the ethnographic evidence to be used for the building of general theory.
(Moran and Hides 1990: 215)

Ethnoarchaeology thus lost its specific raison d’être with the stress put on historical uniqueness and interpretative openness. Ethnographic evidence on material
culture could only be subsumed in a wider framework of anthropological theorybuilding, not in the specifics of archaeological explanation. Thomas, inspired by
Ricoeur, regretted that ‘the great bulk of archaeological writing [was] conducted
under the sign of the Same’ (1991: 3) All too often, he argued, archaeologists
made use of ‘some form of universalism, whether it is called analogy, uniformitarianism or middle-range theory’ (3). He advocated ‘an archaeology of difference’,
‘a contrastive history’, which entailed ‘the recovery of temporal difference’ and
maintained ‘the strangeness of the past, its alien quality’ (5). By giving a false impression of familiarity, ethnoarchaeology only removed the past’s alterity.

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Inspiration, speculation, reification
Rhetorically redundant, theoretically problematic, and politically unwanted,
ethnoarchaeol­ogy suffered from the conceptual climate which stressed the culturally unique over cross-cultural generalization, difference over similarity, open
interpretation over precise inference; a climate which also proclaimed a radically
different perspective on non-western others. However, whereas many post-processualists like Thomas, Barrett and Hodder (after 1986) avoided an ethnographic
impetus altogether, some still incorporated lengthy descriptions on material culture in contemporary non-industrialized societies in their archaeological texts—
albeit for entirely different purposes. The later work of Chris Tilley, consisting
of three monographs published in the 1990s, is a case in point. His study of
prehistoric rock carvings in northern Sweden contained sections on the ritual
cosmology of the Evenks from west Siberia and on the contemporary rock-art
from aboriginal Australia (Tilley 1991: 126-37; 164-7). He wrote: ‘The use of
ethnohistorical data is, of course, fraught with difficulties and can only take us
further in an hermeneutic appropriation of the meaning of the carvings to a limited degree’ (1991: 136). In contrast to the contextual publications, his argument
did not draw on extrapolations from personal ethnoarchaeological fieldwork but
used ethnographic and ethnohistorical literature as heuristic devices in his endeavours at hermeneutic understanding. Tilley’s subsequent book on prehistoric
landscapes in Britain contained a substantial chapter on Australian and Alaskan
representations of landscape, highlighting its affective, emotional and symbolic
significance (Tilley 1994: 35-67). Again, what Tilley attempted to do was not so
much finding straightforward ethnoarchaeological parallels or principles of behaviour like material-culture strategies, but assembling, rather impressionistically
and selectively, a number of ideas about landscape which were very different from
a functionalist, industrialist point of view. Ethnography was an escape route to get
out of one’s own eurocentrism—but by treating non-Western others as a unitary
category it ran the risk of even reinforcing it. In his latest book on metaphors and
material culture, Tilley included a chapter on contemporary Wala canoe building
in Melanesia, based on ethnographic fieldwork (Tilley 1999: 102-32). Here, the
study no longer fulfilled an ancillary role to archaeology, but stood on its own,
side to side with other chapters on prehistory and material culture theory. Tilley’s
work thus reveals how the ethnography of material culture could be invoked as a
source of inspiration for archaeologists but also how it could become a research
field in its own right.
Those post-processualists who still admitted an anthropological input in their
interpretations, generally restricted it to inspirational purposes. The most extreme
example of this comes from a recent article on Stonehenge published in Antiquity
by the archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina, an inhabitant from
Madagascar who ‘has lived his life in communities which regularly erect standing
stones’ (Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina 1998: 309). Initially based on a BBC
documentary, Ramilisonina’s visit to Europe’s premier megalithic monument led
to a scholarly publication on the meaning of Stonehenge. The authors recognized
four different but convergent analogies. There was a ‘formal analogy’ between

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Neolithic Britain and contemporary Madagascar in that megalithic construction
took place in both (which is more an observed similarity than an analogy). They
further saw a ‘cross-cultural analogy’ in the social significance of ancestors, ‘a phenomenon found in many societies’ and therefore probably present with ‘the people
of Late Neolithic Wessex’ (310; note that this is rather a cross-cultural, descriptive generalization than an analogy). They also stressed the ‘relational analogy’ in
Madagascar between standing stones and ancestors: such stones are erected after
death and become the places where contact with the deceased is sought (again,
this is a description of one particular context rather than an analogy between two
contexts). Finally, they presented an ‘analogy of materiality’ which stressed the
inherent physical qualities of stone like durability, hardness, and imperishableness as natural, universal metaphors for concepts like eternity and immortality
(a metaphorical quality to guarantee uniformitarian bridging). It was actually the
combination of these four lines of evidence which resulted into one analogy: given
the standing stones in Stonehenge and Madagascar, given their ancestral meaning
in Madagascar, given the global importance of ancestors and universal metaphorical properties of stone, the conclusion was clear—like Malagasy standing stones,
Stonehenge was built for the ancestors. Compared to the analogous wooden architecture of the living from nearby Woodhenge, Stonehenge presented a ‘lithicized’
version for the dead (a similar duality was found in Avebury). It was not the place
for processions, rituals and feasting, such as current opinion holds (in particular
Barrett). On the contrary, the lack of large quantities of rubbish marked it as a
locale strictly reserved for the ancestors.
Although the authors indicated major differences with Madagascar (where
standing stones are fairly small and related to individual ancestors, as opposed
to the massive constructions for collective ancestors in Neolithic Britain), and
though they relied on strictly archaeological arguments as well (the wooden similes unearthed near Stonehenge and Avebury, the absence of rubbish), their entire
argument still hinged in a Sollas-like fashion upon the Malagasy analogy of ancestral worship and stone erection. Because if ancestor worship is truly quasi-universal, and if stones naturally refer to eternity, then one is surprised that only certain
societies erect stone structures for the dead. The whole argument rested on the
unquestioned assumption that remembrance is associated with monumentality in
durable materials, a point on which Western and Malagasy society happen to converge. However, it is forgotten that in many non-western societies, remembrance
can also be achieved through destruction of material culture. It suffices to recall
the case of the elaborate Malangan sculptures in Melanesia which are destroyed
shortly after the funerary ritual to realize that ritual destruction can be as good
a mnemonic device as monumentality (Rowlands 1993). What is dressed up as
four independent and converging analogies in Parker Pearson’s and Ramilisonina’s
argument rapidly boils down to one formal analogy: the observed similarity between source and target (stone erection in Neolithic Britain and contemporary
Madagascar) leads to a predicted similarity (ancestral worship at Stonehenge) on
the basis of such accidental linkage in the Malagasy source. The article shows what
the excesses of post-processualism can lead to: an attitude to ethnography which

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is at best selective and impressionistic, and at worst gratuitous and remarkably
|ignorant about the logic of analogy.
Even in Palaeolithic archaeology, the field least affected by the post-processual
vogue, such haphazard use of analogy re-emerged, particularly in the interpretation of cave art which is traditionally one of the ‘softer’ realms of Palaeolithic research. In a heavily mediatized monograph, French rock art specialist Jean Clottes
and South-African anthropologist David Lewis-Williams (1996) argued that prehistoric rock art could best be understood as shamanic practice. The geometrical,
abstract and fantastic depictions would in their view represent the different stages
of shamanic trance; each stage of altered consciousness giving rise to particular
visual experiences. Since shamanism was argued to be a ubiquitous phenomenon
on a global scale and since the modern human mind had like workings everywhere, their dual neuropsychological and ethnological approach enabled to speak
about shamanism for the Upper Palaeolithic. These universal warrants notwithstanding, in practice their argument came down to expanding Lewis-Williams’
research on shamanism in San rock art to Clottes’ intimate acquaintance with
French cave art. So doing, they literally repeated Sollas’ juxtaposition of Bushmen
and Aurignacian artistic expressions. Sure, the book had the usual warnings that
one should not paste the present onto the past, but just as with Parker Pearson and
Ramilisonina’s paper, their argument projected one specific ethnographic context
onto a past reality, dressed up with universalist claims and devoid of any serious
discussion on analogy. Regardless of the possible merit of their interpretation, one
is surprised to read their succinct statement on ethnographic comparison which
regrets the presence of exact parallels and argues that only ‘comparison of what
is comparable’ (Clottes and Lewis-Williams 1996: 64) is legitimate: a blatant recourse to formal similarity—as if there had never been an ethnoarchaeological
discussion on analogy at all. Paul Bahn (1997: 67) rightly criticized their ‘use of
ethnographic analogy to achieve a “best fit hypothesis” ’:
Far more caution and rigour are needed to avoid the abuses of ethnography seen
earlier this century, as well as the simplistic wholesale transfer of specific interpretations from one body of evidence to the other in what has been called ‘ethnographic snap.’

Bahn found that much of the shamanic theory ‘sounds suspiciously like the
simple projection of the view of 20th-century post-processualists into past’ (66).
Ethnography nowadays seems to serve an inspirational purpose comparable
to the one it had in the 1960s. Even the cautionary note has re-emerged from its
ashes now that the links between archaeology and anthropology are loosened! In
his acute article ‘Questions not to ask of Malagasy carvings’ the anthropologist
Maurice Bloch (1995), who, like Parker Pearson worked with art in Madagascar,
outlined the difficulties encountered in interpreting wood decoration as ‘a cautionary tale [...] of the attempts at interpretation’ (1995: 212). Cautionary tale or
creative inspiration, the function of anthropology in the archaeology of the 1990s
strongly recalls the situation of the mid-1960s, in particular also because of its
poor consideration of the issue of analogy. But where the early New Archaeologists

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eventually sought to improve their inferences by testing, post-processualists were
totally unconcerned with the mechanisms of verification. And this, in fact, shows
how the work of the latter not only echoes the 1960s but also the 1860s. Its
glossing together of contemporary non-industrialized perspectives with prehistoric contexts and its covert use of projective reasoning remind even more of
the late nineteenth-century, socioevolutionist logic. Of course, post-processualists
make every effort to repudiate the cross-cultural, racial and colonial discourse, but
their selective use of ethnography results in a similar creation of a homogeneous,
unitary category of the non-modern, non-western other which embraces both
present and prehistoric people. ‘Alterity’ functions as an umbrella term for very
different sorts of human experiences. Despite its explicit avoidance of essentialism
and dichotomous reasoning, the inspirational function of ethnography precisely
affirmed such thinking! In the absence of a broader conceptual framework, this
browsing in the ethnographic world remained haphazard: more often than not it
simply found what it was looking for. And it reified the old Western-non Western
dichotomy in a way hardly seen since the Victorian evolutionists.

Modern material culture studies
On the other hand, the autonomous study of material culture has in recent years
emancipated itself into a rich and autonomous field of social and cultural anthropology. Stimulated by contextual ethnoarchaeology, it is still appreciated and
frequently conducted by archaeologists like Tilley in his latest book. The same
holds true for modern material culture studies: originally a part of the ethnoarchaeological fabric (not only in the work of Hodder and Miller, but also in the
writings of Schiffer, Rathje and even Ascher), it became a distinctive research field
in its own right, particularly through the writings of Daniel Miller who called for
‘an independent discipline of material culture’ (1987: 112; cf. 1994). Whereas
a ‘post-processual ethnoarchaeology’ was never really aimed at (despite the vain
attempts by some North-American scholars, cf. David 1992; Stark 1993), the
study of material culture in modern and non-modern societies burgeoned as never
before in archaeology and anthropology. In 1996 a new journal was launched,
the Journal of Material Culture, and even before the first issue appeared it counted more than 600 subscribers. It was the British, post-processual answer to the
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. Its editors were—not surprisingly—Daniel
Miller and Christopher Tilley who wrote that the editorial policy aimed to bring
together ‘interdisciplinary research [...] on the ways in which artifacts are implicated in the construction, maintenance and transformation of social identities’
(1996: 5). Besides a relatively small number of archaeological papers (often on aspects of later British prehistory) which are invariably devoid of ethnoarchaeological inputs, the first volumes presented articles on themes like ‘objects and subjects
in windsurfing’, ‘Vietnam Zippos’, and even ‘the material culture of tampons and
napkins’. By the end of the twentieth century ethnoarchaeology, once an isolated
subfield of processual craftsmanship, had been transformed into material culture

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studies, a discipline in which prehistoric archaeologists, social anthropologists,
sociologists of modernity and contemporary historians energetically engaged (Van
Dommelen 1999, in press).

An age of extremes
The period after 1982 was by all means an age of extremes in the appreciation of
ethnographic analogy. From a North-American field of technical and polemical
middle-range research predominantly on contemporary hunter-gatherers undertaken to elucidate the more mechanical formation processes of Palaeolithic archaeological records, over a British exercise in general theory building conducted
amid modern societies of pastoralists and agriculturalists and applied in studies of
recent European prehistory, to material culture studies, a new branch of social science research that became increasingly detached from archaeological implications,
ethnoarchaeology took on many forms as it went through the hands of processualists, contextualists and post-processualists. These differences were framed by
a shifting theoretical perspective from functionalism over structural-Marxism to
post-structuralism and hermeneutics.
This is readily observable from the notion of causality. Processual ethnoarchaeology had been successful in isolating causality as the most important criterion of analogical reasoning: relevant linkages within the source context were first
deemed necessary before an extrapolation towards the past could be made. The
insistence on finding such unambiguous and ultimately uniformitarian linkages
led to an increasingly restricted area of research where causation was mechanical
and a-historical. Contextual archaeology drew attention to specific historical contexts, to the particular ways in which general symbolic structures were appropriated in social action. Causality between behavioural dynamics and archaeological
statics became more complex, since it resulted as much from historical norms and
values as from general processes, and since material culture was no longer simply
the product but also the producer of social action. Post-processual archaeology,
finally, eschewed the notion of causality altogether. Since interpretations took on
the form of ongoing understanding and making sense of things which were never
quite certain and unambiguous, not even to the historical actors themselves, explaining cultural practices in causal terms was no longer a desideratum. It is this
changing appreciation of causality which determined the fate of ethnoarchaeology: the possibility of drawing inferences about past realities from observations
in the living world had always required a certain confidence in the existence of
relevant and recurrent correlations between distinct aspects of the source. Since
contemporary archaeology was reluctant to admit this, studies reduced the function of anthropology to merely inspirational or critical purposes, even if this has
resulted in the creation of an essentialist notion of the non-modern other.
However, if there were major divergences in what archaeologists with differing theoretical backgrounds did, there was also a structural convergence in what
they did not do: discussing analogy. After the heightened logical awareness in
the late 1970s and after the groundbreaking publications by Wylie in the early
1980s, the debate on the proper use of analogy ended abruptly. Processual eth-

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noarchaeologists stopped discussing the fundamental principles of their work and
fastened their teeth into a strenuous boost of puzzle-solving activity. Contextual
ethnoarchaeologists pledged allegiance to the plea for relational analogies but in
practice often turned to the very sort of cross-cultural generalizations they loudly
purported to avoid. Most post-processual archaeologists considered analogy as a
non-issue, even if they resorted to an impressionistic borrowing from anthropological literature.
Ironically, the history of debate described here ended with the absence of debate. Ethnoarchaeology was not, or only very rarely, explicitly criticized, it just
disappeared out of sight. The argument by analogy was not overtly rejected, it was
just no longer used. It recalls Max Planck’s bitter statement that older ideas are
not abandoned because they have been disproved, but because they have become
obsolete and their advocates cannot or do not any longer participate in the debate. Contextual and post-processual archaeologists, while generally open to discuss whatever theoretical topic, were remarkably silent on ethnoarchaeology and
ethnographic analogy. Describing their attitude towards these themes consisted of
documenting the pattern of its gradual disappearance and linking it to the central notions of their theoretical perspective. As such, the stress on nonverbal and
nondiscursive practices they defended as essential to an understanding of people
in the past equally applies to their own history.

Conclusion
It has become customary to describe the history of twentieth-century AngloAmerican archaeology by means of a chronological division into three subsequent
stages of theoretical development going from culture-historical archaeology over
processual archaeology to post-processual archaeology. Whereas the didactic qualities of such scheme are undisputed, the formulaic repetition of this tripartite chronology and its forced application to regional traditions outside the English-speaking world (cf. Hodder 1991; Slofstra 1994) risk to turn it into a historiographical
variant of a dogmatic and reified three-age system (Van Reybrouck 1994b). In
the preceding sections I have found it necessary to nuance this classification in a
number of ways. First, by showing that there was often continuity when discontinuity was claimed: the early uses of ethnography by the New Archaeologists often
continued the direct-historical method of the traditional Americanist archaeology they purported to reject; the implicit cross-cultural analogies the contextual
archaeologists resorted to carried on the generalizing and nomothetic efforts of
the processualists. Secondly, the opposite was also true, i.e. there was often discontinuity when continuity was claimed: culture-historical archaeology was a retrospective name for the research of the first half of the century, a label which
lumped together and masked the very real discontinuities between Kossinna’s
Kulturkreislehre on the one hand and Clark’s ecological archaeology on the other;
the New Archaeology of the 1960s was quite distinct from its processual sequel in
the next decade, despite the alleged continuity between the two; similarly, early
contextual archaeology was much more different from post-processual archaeol-

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ogy than current partisans tend to acknowledge. Rather than a tripartite scheme
for the development of archaeological debate, at least a six-fold division would
be needed to do some justice to the intricacies of the disciplinary history in the
Anglo-American world. This would entail a strict culture-historical archaeology
(Kossinna, the early Childe) for the first quarter of the century; a tendency towards functionalism (Clark, the later Childe) and humanism (Wheeler, Hawkes)
shortly before and after the Second World War; the New Archaeology of the 1960s
and early 70s (the early Binford, Clarke, Fritz and Plog, Watson, LeBlanc and
Redman); the processual movement of the mid and late 1970s which continues in
certain fields up to this day (later Binford, Schiffer); the contextual archaeology
of the early 1980s (the early Hodder, Moore); and the post-processualist school
proper which emerged in the late 1980s (the later Hodder, Shanks, Tilley).
Whereas processualism is now stereotypically associated with ethnoarchaeology and the culture-historical and post-processual traditions with the absence of
it, this refined framework allows a more detailed appreciation of the role of ethnography in the history of archaeology. Clearly, rabid culture-historians refrained
from using the evidence from contemporary analogues, as typological classification and artefact seriation were considered the appropriate and sufficient avenues for detecting migration and diffusion. Functionalists like Childe and Clark,
however, accorded a certain, if limited, importance to ethnography. No matter
whether the perspective taken was Marxist or ecological, both renounced the
sweeping cross-cultural comparisons of the nineteenth century and believed that
in cases of historical continuity, or else when ecology, economy and technology
was fundamentally similar, present sources could be invoked to clarify some basic questions of function and organization. Such direct-historical approach was
also popular in mid-century North-American archaeology. Ascher’s reaction and
call for reassessing the more general-comparative approach was not immediately
followed by the New Archaeologists who often stuck to the safer criterion of
historical continuity. Independent testing and critical warning were two procedures they used to circumvent the problematic issue of cross-cultural analogy.
It was only when the impossibility of such testing and the wearisome nature of
such cautionary tales were exposed that ethnoarchaeology started to play an essential role in the elaboration of processual thought. The attempts at law-building, the importance of falsification, the development of middle-range theory and
the emergence of taphonomy were all indebted to work in ethnoarchaeology. Yet
the yearning for logical certainty restricted the scope of research to the realms of
unambiguous and uniformitarian causation. In later years, therefore, the field
became restricted to the actualistic study of mechanical site-formation processes.
At the same time, contextual archaeologists, inspired by certain trends in social
anthropology, used ethnoarchaeology in a looser, less rigid sense as it helped them
to discover and distribute an alternative perspective on material culture. Once
this approach developed into a post-processual school influenced by a philosophy
and literary criticism which stressed alterity and particularism, ethnoarchaeology
disappeared out of sight. The contrast with processual archaeology is remarkable:
whereas processual archaeology had at its start no immediate need for ethnoar-

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chaeological studies, they were the sine qua non for the development of early
post-processual thought. The equation of ethnoarchaeology with the entire two
decades of processualism (New Archaeology and processual archaeology proper)
is, therefore, faulty; so is the equation between the lack of ethnoarchaeological
attention and the whole of post-processualism (contextual archaeology and postprocessual archaeology proper).
To summarize, ethnography played its most decisive roles in functionalist,
high processual and early contextual archaeology, even if that role was a different
one for each period. In order to appreciate these differences, as well as the mutual similarities, it is now time to list the six strength criteria of the argument by
analogy, as we have done so far for primate models and evolutionist ethnographic
parallels.

The strength of ethnoarchaeological analogies
Firstly, it is important to ask to what extent the analogical arguments were strengthened by increasing the number of source contexts. Whereas most nineteenth-century scholars had searched the ethnographic record for the best fitting instance, in
the twentieth century there was a growing tendency to consider more sources at
the same time without privileging the one over the other. Those stressing historical continuity as the basis for analogy were obviously still limited in their choice
of source analogues. Clark, for instance, could only invoke contemporary rural
Finland to illustrate prehistoric Denmark. Watson had to study modern Iran to
clarify early villages in the Near East. Hill and Anderson could only rely on modern Pueblo culture in their interpretation of the prehistoric Midwest. The directhistorical approach still strove to find the one and only source analogue in the
present. The archaeologist had to scan the ethnographic record for models and
‘then select that one, or ones, to best fit in his particular situation’, as Stanislawski
recommended (1974: 20). This changed with the hunter-gatherer ethnoarchaeology of the processual heyday. Although for obvious practical reasons ethnoarchaeologists typically studied only one or two foraging societies (Yellen the !Kung,
Gould the Ngatatjara, Binford the Nunamiut and to a lesser extent to Alyawara,
O’Connell the Alyawara and the Hadza), the eventual aim was to juxtapose these
individual findings in order to increase the number of source contexts. In fact,
none of the processual ethnoarchaeologists proclaimed ‘his’ society as the most
archetypical, the best representative or the closest approximation to life in the
Palaeolithic. On the contrary, Yellen found it ‘extremely acute’ (1977: 5) that his
sample size was limited to one source, as it run the risk of ethnocentricity. For
Binford it was essential to confront his Nunamiut data with the !Kung data in
order to find patterns of variability and causes of variation. (His entire forager
versus collector dichotomy was based on such a comparison.) This eagerness to
expand the source context was epitomized by Whitelaw’s work which did not
draw on one, two, or a couple of modern analogues but entailed a study of no less
than 800 settlements from 112 contemporary or ethnohistorically documented
foraging societies. Contextual ethnoarchaeologists, on the other hand, mitigated
this numerical requirement and contented themselves with studying only a hand-

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ful of ethnographic contexts. This restriction resulted not so much from a belief
that a best source could be found, but from their wish to ‘move away from formal
cross-cultural studies’ to a more careful consideration and understanding of ‘why
material is patterned in a particular way in each cultural milieu’ (Hodder 1982a:
40, original italics). Moreover, since on a more abstract level such material-culture
strategies were thought to be operative in all societies, past and present, industrialized or not, the study of one society allowed ‘to see the world in a grain of sand,’
as Blake would have said.
The variety of source contexts also augmented throughout the century. Advocates
of the direct-historical approach were still preferring a limited sample of homogenous source analogues (like rural societies in the Celtic fringe), but later processualists enthusiastically welcomed heterogeneity. Variability was not avoided but
actively sought. Whitelaw inflated his modern sample because ‘a wide cross-cultural dataset is essential’ (Whitelaw 1991: 141). Schiffer (1978) believed that both
native and ‘Nacirema’ societies could be instructive to derive laws applicable to
the Palaeolithic—such laws were believed to hold across the most diverse forms
of society. Clarke even welcomed models from the physical sciences—molecules
and magnets were as useful as hunters and gatherers. The contextualists, too, applauded diversity of analogues. Hodder believed that ‘Western society is as good
a source for analogies as are less industrialised peoples’ (1982a: 40). Even if the
quest for covering laws was no longer on the agenda, they nonetheless believed
that there were general strategies of material culture appropriation. Hence the emphasis on ethnographic fieldwork in both modern and non-modern settings. The
more varied the examples, the more compelling the concepts of material culture’s
active role and meaningful constitution.
Admitting variation in the source context eventually decreased the attention
for the criterion of similarity. Again, those reasoning from historical continuity still regarded similarity as the all-important yardstick. Clark and Childe first
sought to establish as much common ground between two cultures before drawing analogies, if not in terms of direct descent then at least in terms of structural
resemblance. The early New Archaeologists, too, stressed the amount of convergence between source and target. ‘Closeness of fit’ was still the criterion and the
term used in Ascher’s new analogy (1961: 323), in Ucko’s search in the ethnographic literature (1969: 26), in Gould’s early ethnoarchaeology (1974: 37-8),
and in Stanislawski’s pottery studies (1974: 20). Anderson preferred to reason
from ‘similar or identical implements’ (1969: 134) and Stiles very explicitly stated
that ‘the degree of similarity in the two sets of data would determine the probability of the analogy being correct’ (1977: 96). However, with the further development of processual thought, this reliance on similarity alone came under
fire. Freeman (1968: 265) had already criticized ‘the use of assumed similarities’
in ethnoarchaeological reasoning but it was David Clarke who formulated the
strongest opposition when he wrote that ‘goodness of fit is not sufficient justification for selecting one particular analogy’ (1972b: 40). In subsequent years, during
the heyday of ethnoarchaeology, similarity was abandoned as the pivotal criterion for analogical reasoning. Gould made a 180-degree turn: ‘Ethnoarchaeology

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should not be seen as an attempt directly to achieve a close “fit” between
larger and larger numbers of resemblances occurring in both past and present-day
cases. [...] Analogues, based as they are on resemblances, are self-fulfilling’ (Gould
and Watson 1982: 374, 375). It was in this context that the number and variety
of source analogues was increased and that the criterion of relevance was more
fully discussed; formal similarity could simply no longer do. Binford wrote: ‘The
simple faith that similar forms had similar causes seems to be a very naive position’
(1985: 581). Once the hallmark of ethnographic comparisons, similarity was now
rejected as a reliable device. Contextual archaeologists did not set a high price on
this criterion either. As their use of ethnography was on a more general level of
theoretical development, proximity between source and target was not required.
Only the most recent examples of ethnographic comparison strive again to find
abundant resemblance—Clottes and Lewis Williams maintained that one could
only compare what is comparable; Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina’s argument
rested, after all, on ‘goodness of fit’. Showing some basic likenesses between San
shamanism and prehistoric rock art and between Madagascar and Stonehenge is
considered an appropriate and sufficient strategy of analogical reasoning, especially if these likenesses are dressed up as universal properties in terms of basic
neuropsychological principles or natural inherent metaphorical qualities.
The ability to deal with dissimilarity was also largely dependent upon the eminence one attached to similarity. Authors who highly valued the amount of resemblance were of course at pains to avoid, minimize, or conceal the discrepancies
between source and target. Authors, on the other hand, who did not search for
a close fit, could happily accommodate and even appreciate differences. Gould’s
argument by anomaly, despite its misleading name, consisted in fact of analogical
reasoning which respected differences. He wrote that ‘the differences or contrasts
arising from such comparisons could prove more rewarding than the similarities’; similarities ‘could only confirm what one already knew’, but contrasts ‘could
force us to recognize how the prehistoric past may have differed from present-day
analogues’ (Gould 1980: 35). Yellen, too, accepted the unlikelihood that present
foragers would replicate the past, but continued doing ethnoarchaeology since
divergence between source and target analogues was not believed to be detrimental to it (1977: 4). Murray and Walker knew that ‘the past was not necessarily at
all like the present: things became extinct’; they therefore named ‘the implicit
awareness of the existence of difference [...] most important’ (1988: 275, 262).
Gifford-Gonzalez concurred with that view when she wrote that ‘analogues are
not expected to be homologues, [...] the differences may in fact be enlightening’
(1991: 221). The whole point in zooarchaeological research, she continued, was
to see whether these differences were threatening the analogy or not. Bones from
a modern reference collection might differ markedly from fossil ones in weight,
colour, and chemical composition: ‘However, we deem these traits irrelevant [...]
because they reflect processes which affected the ancient bone postmortem’ (225).
Differences were weighed in terms of relevance.

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This brings us immediately to the criterion of relevance. To Gifford-Gonzalez
‘our security in these analogical inferences stems from a background knowledge
[...] of the causal and functional links’ between the relevant variables in the source
(1991: 225). Analogies were successful to the extent that ‘the links between source
or context on the one hand, and relevant criteria of resemblance on the other, are
thus systematic and causally based’ (Gifford-Gonzalez 1991: 224). The attention
for the vertical relation of causality, and thus for the relevance of similarities and
dissimilarities reached an apex in processual ethnoarchaeology. Yellen’s laboratory
approach, Binford’s focus on statics and dynamics, Schiffer’s behavioural archaeology, Gifford-Gonzalez’s zooarchaeology, all these perspectives were based on the
idea that present processes had to be adequately understood before past predictions could be made. There was no point in projecting contemporary sources
onto the Palaeolithic if the internal functioning of these sources was not clarified.
No matter how many similarities source and target shared, in the absence of a
consideration of relevance, they were pretty useless. Processualists went into such
great efforts at analysing causality in the present that in the long run it became its
sole focus; extrapolation towards the past being increasingly shunned. However,
it would be unfair to accredit only processual archaeology with an interest for
causality and relevance. Clark’s and Childe’s interest in analogy also attached relevance to the similarities reasoned from. It was because ecology, economy, and
technology were regarded as the functional (Clark) or infrastructural (Childe)
determinants of society that they were staged as the relevant bases for comparison. Contextual archaeologists, on the other hand, showed very little attention for
this criterion. Believing that causality was not an appropriate term to speak about
unique cultural contexts, the notion of relevance soon disappeared out of sight.
The interest in the vertical relation of causality thus diminished, with the most
recent uses of ethnography (on Stonehenge and shamanism) even narrowly relying
again on the horizontal relations of similarity.
The attention given to the sixth criterion, the weight of the analogical conclusion, varied considerably during the century. Originally, the conclusion arrived
at did not outweigh the premises of the analogy. Crawford only used analogy to
infer the general function of otherwise enigmatic finds. Clark and Childe, too,
suggested that analogy could only be invoked for interpreting the most mundane
aspects of prehistoric life. Before the advent of the New Archaeology, the role of
ethnographic comparison was thus situated at the lowest rungs of Hawkes’ ladder: it generally dealt with technological matters (attribution of function, mode
of manufacture), occasionally with economic themes (Clark’s interpretation of
coastal farmers), and only very rarely with social topics (Clark’s interpretation
of Star Carr as a community). Processual ethnoarchaeologists who worked on
hunter-gatherers were more eager to address economic and social themes like, on
the one hand, resource strategies, exploitation systems, foraging modes, and, on
the other, site structure, population density, and length of occupation. However,
despite these higher ambitions, the analogical inferences did not become outrageous, probably because processual archaeology was so antithetical to speculation.
Only when causes were mechanistic could very precise inferences be drawn; in

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case of lesser inferential confidence, the weight of the conclusion diminished accordingly. Contextual archaeologists, however, were mostly far less prudent: specific material culture strategies could be displaced from one context to another,
mostly on the basis of only assumed similarities or alleged universals; think for instance of Hodder’s claim that in lineage-based societies, women typically use domestic architecture as a means of social expression. This being said, in most cases
the conclusions remained vague enough to respect the balance between premises
and conclusion. Hodder did never claim that in all agricultural societies pottery
decoration was an instrument of identity bargaining; only that material culture
was a powerful instrument of social negotiation. Less rigid than processualism,
contextualists and later post-processualists were enabled to climb the social, symbolical and ideational rungs of Hawkes’ hierarchy. It is no coincidence that the
latest examples of ethnographic analogy dealt with cosmological themes related
to megalithic monuments and rock art. It is no coincidence either that these
examples severely imbalance input and output. It is quite a step to reason from
the formal similarity between standing stones in Madagascar and Stonehenge to
ancestral worship. It equally requires quite a leap of imagination to reason from
visual resemblances between San rock art and Palaeolithic cave art to shamanic
rituals, initiation rites, and membranous walls that separate the given world from
the underworld. Indeed, such imbalanced analogies rapidly turn into a ‘barrage of
unfounded speculation,’ as Paul Bahn named it (1997: 65).
Surveying how archaeologists in the twentieth century dealt with strength criteria of analogical reasoning, two marked shifts can be noticed. Whereas defendants of direct-historical analogy still relied on the horizontal relation of similarity,
processual archaeologists turned to the vertical relation causality. True to their
name, processual archaeologists were more interested in processes than in trait
lists. Since the study of hunter-gatherers was one of their prime areas of interest,
the entire issue of continuity and similarity was out of the question. Working on
the Mousterian, the African Lower Stone Age, or the late Palaeolithic reindeer
hunters, processual archaeologists had to devise ingenious strategies to circumvent
the problem of reasoning from similarity. No one wanted to commit the same fallacies as Sollas had done, so other avenues of research were sought for meaningful
extrapolation from the present. The processual interest for causality evaporated
with the rise of contextual and post-processual archaeologies and despite claims to
the contrary, analogical reasoned returned to cross-cultural projections, impressionistic sampling and inspirational purposes.

Optimism, pessimism and the redundancy of analogy
Kossinna and Binford might not be the most evident archaeological partners, but
they converged on one crucial point: their unmitigated optimism as to the potentials of archaeological research. Kossinna’s identification of ‘Töpfer mit Völkern’
was closely paralleled by young Binford’s trust that ‘the total extinct cultural system’ was represented in the archaeological record. In both cases, there were high
hopes that what was looked for (cultures for the one, systems for the other) could

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be reasonably well recovered from the evidence. Archaeology’s material and formal
object were experienced as being not far apart from each other. Sound archaeological methods, it was believed, were enough to bridge both ends. Ethnographic
analogy was not really needed, in fact, its influence might even have distorted the
study of the past.
It must be said that for most part of the twentieth century such optimism was
rather rare and the dependence on analogy therefore more frequent. Indeed, if
there is one general tendency in twentieth-century archaeology, it is that the relation between material remains and prehistoric people has become more and more
problematic. Kossinna’s equation of pots with people was already questioned in
the Interbellum when ‘the Indian behind the artefact’ was sought. Material culture was once believed to represent people, now it was believed to hide them. The
second quarter of the century was marked by an incessant drive to go beyond the
study of mere objects to reach a fuller understanding of societies—as well as by
the frustration of reaching such ambitious ends. It was in this context that the
old procedure of ethnographic analogy was dusted, though all connotations with
the sweeping nineteenth-century comparative method were avoided. Had the culture-historical equation between pots and people been questioned by functionalist
and humanist archaeologists, it was rejected by processualists. Not so much for
the obvious reason that they disliked migrationism and diffusionism, but because
the relationship between behaviour and remains, between dynamics and statics,
between systemic context and archaeological context became the prime focus of
attention. Ethnoarchaeology provided a laboratory setting where this relationship
could be studied in vivo and it turned out to be more complex, multifaceted and
problematic than ever expected. As a consequence, contextualists eschewed the
faith that causal linkages could be found, especially since they added that material
culture also constituted the social order. Ethnoarchaeology had helped to develop
such ideas, but was eventually dismissed in the particularist climate of opinion.
Ethnoarchaeology, and more broadly ethnographic analogy, thus thrived between two extremes: between the solid linkage of archaeological remains and prehistoric reality at the beginning of the twentieth century and the profound scepticism regarding the existence of such linkage at the end of it; between a vertical
relation of causality that was depicted as bold line and one that was depicted
without lines at all. Ethnoarchaeology required a dotted line, a minimum of trust
in causal links that could be explored, analysed and unravelled. And this is where
processual archaeology prospered—in the study of causality, in the assessment of
relevant similarities and differences, in the increase and variety of source contexts,
in the balance between premise and conclusion.

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Chapter 4

Primate models

The idea of a primate model
Why did it take several centuries to find out the possibility of polyphonic chant
in the late ninth century? Why did it take so long before perspective drawing was
discovered by Italian artists in the fifteenth century? Why was the bicycle only
invented in the early nineteenth century? Looking at the history of Western art
and technology, we are struck by the number of late appearances of what we now
see as relatively simple innovations. The combination of several melodic voices
into one song, the conventional representation of a three-dimensional world on
canvas and the conjoining of two wheels with a simple frame all seem such simple
attainments that, as soon as they exist, we start to wonder why it took so long to
discover them and how we managed to live without for so long. However, we tend
to forget that these inventions only rarely respond to a long-standing need; very
often such a need existed only shortly before or was even created together with the
invention. In fact, nobody longed to cycle before the nineteenth century: it took
more than fifty years after the first bicycle was assembled that people commonly
ventured on the wobbly vehicle. The invention of the bicycle was not the consequence of a public demand but its cause.
Much the same holds true for the idea of primate modelling, i.e. the insight
that living apes and monkeys can shed light on the remote human past. It is hard
to believe that such apparently simple idea was only very recently elaborated, in
particular since popular culture has made us familiar to see chimpanzees as some
living fossil ancestors. Yet the idea of a primate model, even when not restricted to
chimpanzees alone, is of a surprising young date. Indeed, it was only in the 1950s
that the relevance of nonhuman primates for understanding human behavioural
evolution started to be systematically explored. In this introductory section, I
want to briefly outline the historical pedigree of this idea and also indicate the
contexts within which it was eventually ‘discovered’. I will argue that the need for
a primate model, was only seriously felt after World War II, particularly in the

More than a didactic opener, my brief reference to the history and sociology of technology stems
from the conviction that these studies are quite illuminating in understanding the history of science.
‘Technology is the shibboleth that tests the quality of science studies,’ Callon and Latour once wrote
(1992: 358).

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context of an ideological reformulation of the definitions of humanity and animality and the discoveries of fossils older than anything hitherto known.
Nonetheless, this recent idea built on previous traditions of academic scholarship in disciplines such as anatomy, zoology and psychology, just like Renaissance
painting was indebted to the canons of medieval and classical art or just like early
polyphony drew upon traditional Gregorian chant. Though recent, the idea of
primate modelling was not entirely new, but an innovative elaboration which incorporated older ideas in new contexts. Somewhat simplified, we can divide the
pedigree of this idea into four episodes of unequal length, each dominated by a
central assumption:
1. Antiquity to Enlightenment: the anatomy of primates can elucidate the anatomy of modern humans.
2. Nineteenth century: the anatomy of nonhuman primates can elucidate the
anatomy of fossil humans.
3. Early twentieth century: the behaviour of nonhuman primates can elucidate
the behaviour of modern humans.
4. Postwar period: the behaviour of nonhuman primates can elucidate the behaviour of fossil humans.
Such a step-by-step division entails the risk of suggesting a gradualist and presentist history of science which sees past knowledge only as a ladder to the present
pinnacle of understanding. However, these episodes do not imply any ascending
order of perfection; as periods characterized by one basic assumption, they rather
resemble autonomous, Foucaultian epistemes. In fact, this periodization is closely
related to the disciplines in which primates were successively studied, medicine,
zoological systematics and natural history, psychology and anthropology. At certain moments of their development, these disciplines realized the value of studying primates. The rise of a new step does, therefore, not necessarily imply the end
of the former; only that new disciplines became interested, building on previous
scholarship on primates: primate anatomy was still studied in palaeontology after
the nineteenth century, but psychology came in; psychologists were still interested

For this section I have mostly relied on the excellent, if often old, literature available. The classical
study is by Yerkes and Yerkes (1929) who assembled all historical sources on anthropoid apes before
the twentieth century. Relying on this work, Morris and Morris (1966) provide a useful overview,
as do Ducros and Ducros (1995). On specific periods, Jennison (1937) and McDermott (1938)
focus on the ape in Antiquity and should be read along with Janson’s superb study (1952) of simian
representations in medieval and Renaissance art. For popular and scientific perceptions of primates
after 1600 to the present day, much valuable information can be found in a volume edited by
Corbey and Theunissen (1995; see also Corbey 1996). The history of American physical anthropology, including primatology, is well known through a special issue of the American Journal of Physical
Anthropology (1981, 4) and through a volume edited by Frank Spencer (1982). Donna Haraway’s
baroque, controversial and sweeping Primate Visions (1989) is an incredibly rich but irritably dense
authoritative source on primatology and ape lore in the 20th century. Michael Schwibbe from the
Deutsches Primatenzentrum Göttingen very generously sent me his unpublished manuscript Große
Affe: Mythen, Fakten und Fiktionen which presents a detailed history of Western understanding of
great apes, a timely update of Yerkes and Yerkes (1929).

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in primate cognition after the Second World War, but anthropology joined. This
division suggests the rise of new ideas out of older ones, not the end of old ones
as such.

First episode: from primate anatomy to human anatomy
Monkeys and apes figure in myths throughout the world. Their directly observable, uncanny similarities with humans, combined with their equally obvious differences, make them ideal creatures for mythologization. They provide a rich and
complex texture on which multiple ideas about human nature can be projected.
Whereas monkeys were worshipped in the ancient civilizations of Egypt, India
and possibly Mesopotamia, in the Judaeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman tradition
they were associated with trickery, mischief and lasciviousness (Jennison 1937;
McDermott 1938; Morris and Morris 1966). Such extremely divergent cultural attitudes are typical for liminal beings which violate the boundary between
man and beast, between civilized and savage, between culture and nature (Corbey
1993). The difficulty to assign them a place in our mental categories, i.e. their categorial ambiguity is eliminated either by worship or by scorn. Whatever attitude
is taken, the mythological position of the primate is always defined in terms of its
similarity to humans.
Early scientists were also fascinated by the likenesses between human and nonhuman primates (Spencer 1995). In his Historia Animalium Aristotle (384-322
B.C.) described the three known monkeys of his age—the cercopithecine, the
baboon and the tailless macaque—noting how the interior and exterior of the
animals resembled human anatomy. Galen (c. 130-200), the great physician from
Pergamum, pursued this observation with an important practical consequence:
when studying the anatomy of human corpses was prohibited in his time, he
urged to dissect monkeys instead. His views on the human body gained so much
authority that they would last unchanged for nearly 1500 years. It was only when
Andreas Vesalius published his monumental De fabrica corpori humanis (1543),
largely the result of his nocturnal escapades to the gallows and clandestine dissections of criminals’ corpses, that Galen’s conclusions proved to be wrong in several
respects (Dougherty 1995). Galen’s work, though, is important because it clearly
shows how the anatomy of primates was thought to be relevant to understanding
human anatomy. The study of monkeys was thus firmly rooted in the classical and
medieval tradition of medicine. Throughout the Middle Ages, this anatomical
similarity was acknowledged but the mental difference was thought to be fundamental. Most medieval theologians and artists regarded the monkey as a diabolical creature, a naturae degenerantis homo, a fallen man characterized by ugliness,
untrustworthiness, lust and sin (Janson 1952: 73-94; 107-44).
With Vesalius’ dissections of humans, it seems as if nonhuman primates were
no longer needed to understand human biology. This would have been true, were
it not that at the same time that Vesalius run his scalpel through human skin, exploratory travellers had come into contact with creatures which were even more
humanlike than the barbary ape or hamadryas baboon thus far known in the West.
The discovery of the great apes in early modern times posed a new challenge to

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definitions of humanity and animality in Western thought (Janson 1952: 332-5).
Portuguese Jesuits working in Sierra Leone during the sixteenth and seventeenth
century wrote about the behaviour of chimpanzees, even including tool-use (Sept
and Brooks 1994). In 1641, probably the first anthropoid to reach Europe was a
chimpanzee described by the Dutch anatomist Nicolaas Tulp as an ‘orang-outang’.
And the Englishman Edward Tyson was the first to dissect a chimpanzee in 1699
(Montagu 1943; Nash 1995). He held that the animal was an intermediate (but
not an evolutionary) link between man and ape, and added that all mythological
creatures such as pygmies, cynocephali, satyrs and sphinxes were in fact monkeys
or apes. From an instrument in the medical study of the human body and theological inquiry, in postmedieval times primate anatomy became an object of zoological attention and philosophical discourse about the limits of humanity.
Confronted with an increasing number of anthropoid evidence from chimpanzees, orangs, and also gibbons, scholars in the second half of the eighteenth
century struggled over the taxonomic position of the great apes (Yerkes and Yerkes
1929: 16-26; Röhrer-Ertl 1988; Dougherty 1995). Gibbons, which had just been
discovered, were not easily classified because of the great differences between the
species. Chimps and orangs were often mixed up, supporting the long-standing
theory on there being two varieties of orang-utan, the black in Africa and the
red in Asia. The great sexual dimorphism in orang-utans and the fact that the
skeletons of young orangs look more like chimp skeletons than like mature orangs obscured matters even further, especially since the skins and skeletons, that
were imported drowned in alcohol or totally desiccated, were often of poor quality with vague indications of their actual place of origin. (With the Portuguese
dominating the west coast of Africa, many imports from South-East Asia had to
pass through their ports, so that ‘Angola’ was often given as place of origin of a
specimen, even if this was not the case. Cf. Röhrer-Ertl 1988.) This confusion
was only settled well into the nineteenth century, particularly through the anatomical studies of Richard Owen. The greatest taxonomic dispute in the age of
Enlightenment, however, concerned the position of man vis-à-vis the great apes.
In a very schematic way, one could say that scientists either lumped humans and
anthropoid apes on the basis of observed similarities or splitted them apart on the
basis of equally obvious differences. Among the first, Lord Monboddo included
the orang-utan within the human species (Barnard 1995) and in his first edition
of the Systema Naturae, published in Leiden in 1735, Linnaeus placed man and
ape in the same order of Antropomorpha, later renamed as Primates. Linnaeus’
contemporary, the great French naturalist Buffon, argued strongly against this
lumping together because of man’s unique capacity for reason. The presence of
speech and hands led the German Blumenbach to devise even a separate order
strictly reserved to humans. The debate was a particularly thorny one considering
the wide-spread belief in eighteenth-century biology of what Lovejoy has called
‘the Great Chain of Being’ (Lovejoy 1936: 227-41; Günther 1907: 28-38): the

To complicate matters even further, Angola may have been also confounded with Angkola, a region
in Sumatra where orangs are reported to have lived (Corbey, pers. comm.)

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idea that all organisms in nature could be arranged in an infinite and continuous
sequence, from the most simple to the most complex, a scala naturae devoid of any
hiatuses. Much more than now, differences between great apes and humans were
thought to be minimal—which explains the tug-of-war concerning the definition
of what was human versus what was animal. The demarcation line between the
Hottentots and the orang-utan (literally, ‘the man of the wild woods’) was experienced as rather thin.
Despite profound differences, the European reaction towards monkeys and
apes before 1800 consisted mainly of coming to terms with their anatomical similarity to humans. Most authors acknowledged that the bodies of these animals
were very close to their own physical constitution, but this idea was more than
often minimalized by stressing the mental inferiority of the nonhuman primates.
Humans had ‘soul’ or ‘reason’ (the exact term depending on whether you were
a medieval scholar or an eighteenth-century encyclopedist); apes and monkeys
lacked such mental faculty. They were morally inferior, deprived of articulate
speech and incapable of rational thought—ideas which echoed the pithecophobia
of the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian tradition. It was this ambiguity of
physical closeness and psychic distance against the background assumption of a
scala naturae that led to the vehement taxonomical discussions in the second half
of the eighteenth century.
With most evidence coming from dead rather than living animals, it is no
surprise that research on nonhuman primates was by and large anatomical; behaviour was simply not yet at stake. Apes entered Europe as carcasses shipped
in from Africa and Asia or, if alive, as curiosa displayed in menageries to be dissected after death (Zuckerman 1980). Frédéric Cuvier, the younger brother of
the famous zoologist, observed the antics of a young captive orang-utan that was
brought to Paris in 1810 (Martinez-Contreras 1996). Apart from the anecdotal
and often fanciful accounts by travellers and zoo-keepers, very little was known
about anthropoid behaviour. This led the eighteenth-century naturalist Hoppius,
a student of Linnaeus, to say that ‘it would lead not a little to Philosophy, if one
were to spend a day [with apes] exploring how far human wit exceeds theirs, what
distance lies between Brutish and rational discrimination’ (quoted in Yerkes and
Yerkes 1929: 19). Some French philosophers went even further by assuming that
an understanding of the way primates lived might reveal something about man in
his natural state (Hastings 1936: 109-32). Virey said: ‘Ainsi, l’histoire naturelle des
singes, jetant une vive lumière sur celle de l’homme originel, est trop utile pour qu’on
puisse la négliger.’ And in a note to his famous Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755), Rousseau even argued that some of
the anthropoids such as the orang-utan were no apes but ‘de véritables hommes
sauvages’, the original men who had not devolved into modern man but who lived
‘encore dans l’état primitif de la nature’ (quoted in Hastings 1936: 120). According
to Virey and Rousseau, the lifestyle of primates had something to say about the

human past. Yet it would be wrong to see them as direct precursors of modern primate
modelling; such an evolutionist reading does not do justice to the intricacies of their
thought and time (Moran 1993), nor to the contexts in which primate models emerged
shortly after the Second World War.

Second episode: from living to fossil anatomy
With Linnaeus placing man and ape in one and the same order, a first episode in
the rise of the idea of primate modelling had come to a close. A second episode
can be seen to have matured between the end of the eighteenth century and the
second half of the nineteenth century when some authors developed the idea
that the anatomy of modern primates was not just similar to modern humans but
also instructive on ancient humans—who might have been very different from
what we are now. Apart from medical and anatomical studies on primates, new
fields like comparative zoology and palaeontology (disciplines often practised by
scholars with a medical background) became interested in them. This interest was
flanked by the rise of transformationist theories. Scholars like Aristotle, Galen,
Tyson and Linnaeus had interpreted the anatomical resemblances in essentialist
terms: to them, species were unalterable, natural kinds. And even if they ranked
animals along a scale of beings (Lovejoy 1936), this categorization was strictly gradational and never evolutionary in that one species could not evolve into another
(Spencer 1995).
The emergence of transformationist theories in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century, such as Lacépède’s and Lamarck’s, allowed to see the anatomical resemblances and divergences as signs of changes through time. This vision led
to Charles Darwin’s controversial theory of evolution through natural selection.
Although he hardly spent a single sentence in the Origin of Species (1859) on the
issue of human evolution, to his supporters like Huxley and Haeckel it became
clear that primate species were connected through ancestral links. Darwin himself turned to the subject in his Descent of Man, published in 1871. On the basis
of embryology and comparative anatomy (much less on the basis of the scant
fossil evidence), he concluded that ‘man is descended from a hairy quadruped,
furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World’ (1871, 2: 389). Darwin provided his readership with
a reconstruction of the anatomical peculiarities of ‘our early progenitor’, inferred
from what he saw among embryos and extant primates. The emphasis was on
anatomy; behavioural aspects only making an entrance in his study of facial expressions (1872). Drawing from his observations and minor experiments with the
primates in the London Zoological Gardens, he suggested that humans’ emotional
displays paralleled the simian pattern and were therefore the result of evolution
(Loy 1997). This was a rare case of evolutionary reconstruction in the nineteenth
century based on behavioural observation, though ‘behaviour’ was here limited to

Rousseau’s view of the natural state, for instance, is essentialist and does not have the temporal
implication of human evolution.

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such physiological aspects like the expression of emotion through body coloration
and ear movements; it was definitely not social behaviour.
Darwin’s impact was of course tremendous. Now, chimpanzees no longer simply looked similar to humans; they had actually been descended from the same
progenitor. This made them promising anatomical models when the first human
fossils were discovered. A good example of this use of chimpanzee morphology in
a palaeontological argument comes from Fraipont’s study of the Neanderthal skeletons from Spy (discovered in 1886): Fraipont investigated the Neanderthal posture by comparing the tibia from the Spy 2 specimen with a chimpanzee and human shin bone. He found the chimpanzee tibia most similar and concluded that
the Neanderthal must have had habitually bent knees (Fraipont 1888). Although
this conclusion was eventually refuted, Fraipont’s method is important because it
uses the anatomy of a modern anthropoid to make inferences about a fossil hominid, a technique which would soon become standard in human palaeontology.
With the growing acceptance of evolutionary thought during the second half of
the nineteenth century, similarities and differences between man and ape turned
from structural to chronological, as if the dividing lines of the essentialist tradition had been bundled into one long time-axis.
It comes as a surprise that in Victorian interpretations of archaeological evidence there is so little reference to primate behaviour. In a time obsessed with
finding a life image of our brutal and savage ancestors one would expect that
orang-utans and gorillas (the latter were only first described in 1847 and brought
to Europe in 1855; cf. Yerkes and Yerkes 1929: 31-5) would be welcomed as living
precursors. In fact, they were—but only so in extra-scientific circles where novels,
newspapers, narrative writing had their say. Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue
Morgue, published in 1841, staged a gruesome and bloodthirsty orang-utan. Paul
du Chaillu’s vivid descriptions of his ‘chasse au gorille’ (1863; cf. Vaucaire 1931)
sent a shiver through his civilized readership in Europe and America. And Harper’s
Weekly, a popular illustrated magazine at the time, described the Neanderthal as
a ‘ferocious-looking, gorilla-like human being’ (quoted in Trinkaus and Shipman
1993: 109). But when we turn to the scientists themselves, no behavioural parallels were drawn between primates and primeval humans. All great social evolutionists (Chapter 2) opted to confine their studies on the origin of civilization to
what they saw as the lower limit of humanity instead of the upper reaches of the
animal kingdom—a point forcefully made by the eminent historian of anthropology Stocking (1987: 176-7). Tylor’s inquiry ground to a halt with the description
of the Tasmanians as the lowest savages available. Whereas the eighteenth-century
savant looked at what lay below the Hottentots (and found the orang-utan), the
nineteenth-century scholar stopped at the lowest point of the human realm. How
was this possible?
One reason might be that there were no reliable observations coming from decent
fieldwork. This was true, but such fieldwork did not exist for ethnographic information either which laid at the basis of the parallels we encountered in Chapter 2. This
being said, the quality of both types of observation was not entirely equal: ethnographic
documentation was much more elaborate as it was gathered by observers who had often

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extensive contacts with native populations; knowledge on primates remained confined
to anecdotal accounts of short-term observations or second-hand information obtained
from missionaries or natives. ‘Sound knowledge respecting the habits and mode of life of
the man-like Apes,’ Thomas Huxley (1863: 24) regretted, ‘has been even more difficult
of attainment than correct information regarding their structure.’ In order to explain
the archaeological evidence and the development of human civilization, contemporary
savages were apparently ‘savage enough’ to the eyes of late-nineteenth century scholars.
Lubbock found it ‘very improbable that man can have existed in a lower condition than
that thus indicated’ by contemporary races (1865: 475). Since the overwhelming evidence of prehistoric man consisted of stone tools, the link with savages and their material culture was much more easily drawn than with vague primates. Savages were generally believed to approximate nonhuman primates anyway, both in their anatomy and in
their antics. So when given the chance between either multiple and detailed accounts of
savage practices relevant to Palaeolithic remains or scarce and often fanciful descriptions
of great ape behaviour, many authors chose the first option, especially since they saw
themselves as real scientists working with reliable evidence, not stories. Huxley’s (1863:
54) judgement on Du Chaillu’s imaginative description of the gorilla was: ‘It may be
truth, but it is not evidence.’ If an analogy explains the unknown in terms of the known,
the nonhuman primates seem to have been too relatively unknown in comparison with
non-European savages. This was to change slowly.

Third episode: from primate behaviour to human behaviour
At the turn of the century the first naturalistic field studies on primates were being
undertaken in Africa by Richard Garner and Eugène Marais. Enclosing himself
in an iron cage in order to watch chimpanzees in West-Africa during the 1890s,
Garner was the first to study primate behaviour in the wild, although the chimps
were quite reluctant to show themselves (Candland 1993). Right after the end of
the Boer War (1899-1902), the South-African poet, journalist, lawyer, and morphine-addict Eugène Marais lived for three years with the chacma baboons in his
native land. His publications, written in Afrikaans, received little attention from
scientists; his most important manuscript was lost for more than forty years and

Huxley (1863: 24-54) drew together the available evidence. It was reasonable for the gibbon and
the orang, but minimal for the gorilla and the chimpanzee. He based himself on the reports of Dr.
Savage, a missionary who in the first half of the nineteenth century had collected information from
the natives along the river Gabon. Huxley regarded him as an ‘excellent observer’ (46) , but stressed
that our knowledge of these apes was still ‘much in need of support and enlargement by additional
testimony from instructed European eye-witness’ (25). Huxley realized, however, that only ‘once in a
generation, a Wallace may be found physically, mentally, and morally qualified to wander unscathed
through the tropical wilds of America and Asia’ (25).
Tellingly, if Victorian scholars had an interest in animal behaviour, it mostly concerned well observable animals like bees, ants and beavers. Morgan himself studied beavers, while Lubbock observed
insects (Ingold 1988; Swetlitz 1988; Clark 1998). Huxley (1863) assembled the scarce reports on
great ape behaviour in the wild (cf. previous note); Lubbock (1870) discussed with Argyll the toolusing ability of monkeys; Darwin (1872) observed primate facial expressions in the London Zoo;
and Westermarck (1891) mentioned the parenthood among the great apes. Although all this material was believed to be promising, its importance in the reconstruction of prehistoric behaviour still
was minimal compared to the ethnographic input.

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when it eventually appeared in English, primatology had come of age independently (see Ardrey 1961 and his introduction in Marais 1969; but also Zuckerman
1976). Despite the originality of their work, Garner and Marais are now more
reputed as pre-scientific eccentrics than as primatology’s pioneers.
In the decades preceding World War II apes and monkeys were for the first time
systematically studied, both in captivity and in the field (Maple 1979; Gilmore 1981;
Ribnick 1982). Research, mostly conducted by comparative psychologists, was initiated
in Russia, Germany and Britain; it was ‘the era of maze learning, obstruction boxes, the
delayed response, multiple-choice methods, and the temporal maze’ (Lockard 1971:
19). However, it was the American Robert Yerkes who became the self-crowned and
widely acknowledged founder of primate research. Yerkes was influential on two levels: he undertook experimental studies with captive chimpanzees and he stimulated
naturalistic observations of wild animals. To perform his experiments, he constructed
research laboratories in Connecticut and Florida where the ‘psychobiology’ of captive
primates could be tested (cf. Bourne 1971: 72-149). (Psychobiology was the ill-defined
term Yerkes used to designate his experimental studies of cognition, inventiveness and
other stimulus-induced responses of captive great apes with the aim of finding the biological roots of human psychology.) To improve the breeding programme of his captive
colonies Yerkes knew that more naturalistic information was needed. Although he never
did fieldwork himself, he sent three of his students to the tropics: Nissen (1931) and
Bingham (1932) studied the elusive chimpanzees and gorillas, while Carpenter (1934)
observed howler monkeys in Panama. The latter’s work turned out to be the most successful naturalistic primate study before the war.
Studying the behaviour and cognition of wild and captive primates was for
Yerkes not an end in itself. Throughout his career he stressed how understanding
the apes contributed to ‘the problem of improving human nature and the possibilities of its solution’ for the ‘generally recognized human shortcomings, such
as extreme selfishness, dishonesty, slothfulness, cruelty’ (Yerkes 1943: 10). Since
chimpanzees were ‘psychobiological gold mines’ (Yerkes 1943: 7), knowledge of
their behaviour had an ‘immediate serviceability’ to problems of human welfare
(Yerkes and Yerkes 1929: 590). Like Galen, Yerkes used primates to clarify aspects of modern humans, this time their psychology. Yet in his three classic works
(Yerkes 1916; Yerkes and Yerkes 1929; Yerkes 1943), he never used his chimps to
speculate about human evolution.

This is clear from the number of biographical studies (Carmichael 1969; Rohles 1969; Bourne 1971;
and several articles in Bourne 1977; Nadler 1996) and his prominent place in introductory chapters
of nearly all textbooks in primatology (cf. Haraway 1989: 59-83). When the Premacks developed
an artificial language for chimpanzee experiments, they baptized it ‘Yerkish’. His great impact on
(American) primatology, however, overshadows the importance of other, less fortunate figures, such
as the German Wolfgang Köhler who was forced to abandon his groundbreaking laboratory studies
on the Canary Islands after the first World War and the Russian Nadie Kohts, whose work suffered
from an obvious language barrier. Yerkes knew and admired their work—he was in close touch with
Köhler and even published (together with a Russian colleague) an article on Kohts—but they were
somewhat forgotten in postwar primatology, although in psychology the work of Köhler (1925) is
acknowledged to this day (Glaser 1996).

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The British scientist Solly Zuckerman was in many ways Yerkes’ opposite. He
was a zoologist (not a psychologist), interested in ‘mammalian sociology’ (not primate ‘psychobiology’), who preferred to study the group life (not the individual
cognition) of baboons (not chimps) in zoos and in the wild (not in labs). His
most important book was entitled The social life of monkeys and apes (1932)—note
the difference with Yerkes’ The mental life of monkeys and apes (1916). As to the
relevance of studying primates, he did not share Yerkes’ optimistic hygienics of
the human soul. He refused to see how simplistic parallels between primates and
people could solve the political problems of our age. Because of man’s elaborate
social institutions he found it ridiculous ‘to describe the social behaviour of even
the most primitive savage in the same simple terms that are found adequate to
describe that of the monkey’ (1932: 18). He considered it equally worrisome that
inferences about the past from living primates were often mere backward projections of the behaviour of one living species. To him, the only valid approach
was to look for similarities among all primate species, not just the gorilla or the
chimpanzee:
Thus only the behaviour common to all apes and monkeys can be regarded as
representing a social level through which man once passed in the pre-human stages
of his development. In the life of the monkey one may see a crude picture of the
social level from which our earliest human ancestors emerged. But only that. The
behaviour of the sub-human primate represents a pre-human social level, a level
which, though without culture itself, seems to have contained the seeds that grew
into the culture of primitive man. (Zuckerman 1932: 26)

Zuckerman’s comment might seem a restriction, but in fact it was one of the first
theoretical statements on the palaeoanthropological use of primate parallels. With
much caution, baboons in the London Zoo and captive chimps on Tenerife could
tell us something about the fossils from Peking and Piltdown.
Zuckerman wrote his critique in response to a paper by A.L. Kroeber, who was the
very first anthropologist to look at great apes. In his paper ‘Sub-human culture beginnings’ (1928) Kroeber, who was quite impressed by the chimpanzee experiments of
Köhler and Yerkes, sought to find the ‘organic basis and origin of culture’ (326). He
made an inventory of what was known about chimpanzee psychology, tool use, lack
of speech and even religious anticipations but concluded that chimpanzees and other
great apes had thus far no culture or ‘any such institutional residuum of unmitigatedly
cultural material’ (331). He noted, however, that chimpanzees were largely inventive
(through play, competition, accident, synthesis, ‘destructive impulse’ or any other factor), but that their lack of speech inhibited the transmission and preservation of newly
acquired traits, which was another prerequisite for true culture. Zuckerman (1932: 26)

Before Kroeber, anthropologists had generally not shown any serious interest in primate behaviour to the extent that the zoologist G.S. Miller (1928) found it necessary to summarize existing
knowledge on apes as a corrective on anthropological speculations on the origin of human society.
The tide, however, was changing: in 1930, even a ‘culturalist’ anthropologist like Franz Boas could
declare that ‘a considerable field of social phenomena does not by any means belong to man alone
but is shared by the animal world’ (1930: 201-2).

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warned Kroeber against ‘the paucity of established facts and the frequency of anthropomorphic misinterpretation’—which was a bit superfluous since Kroeber had not drawn
any specific conclusions about the past on the basis of chimpanzees. Instead he believed
that further study of the anthropoids would be ‘invaluable in the illumination of the
basic problems of anthropology and all the social sciences’ (1928: 341) and concluded
nearly prophetically with the words: ‘We have only begun.’
The intimations of Kroeber and Zuckerman bridge the gap between our third
and fourth episode. Before World War II, there was a proliferation of behavioural
studies on nonhuman primates, which were generally motivated by the promise
of gaining more insight into the human mental condition (Loy and Peters 1991).
Although these studies took place within psychology, some anthropological interest in primates and how they might illuminate human origins emerged. However,
as young scientists were summoned for military work during the war, the growing
interest in primate behaviour was interrupted in the West until the mid-fifties. In
the meantime, research on primates started quite independently in Japan (particularly on the indigenous Japanese macaque), but language difficulties prevented
for many years a cross-fertilization of ideas with Western scholars (Frisch 1959;
Kitahara-Frisch 1991; Asquith 1991; 1995; Fedigan and Asquith 1991).

Fourth episode: from primate behaviour to early human behaviour
Although the value of primates in the reconstruction of early human behaviour
was already alluded to by Virey, Rousseau, Huxley, Zuckerman and Kroeber, it
was only after the war that primate modelling gained full momentum. The emphasis shifted from psychology to physical anthropology, from laboratory to savannah, from work on primates to work with primates (Schultz 1971: 7). Modern
means of transport such as the aeroplane and the jeep together with advances in
tropical medicine considerably facilitated fieldwork in the tropics (Schultz 1971;
Washburn 1977). Schultz, the greatest pre-war authority on primate anatomy
whose fabulous collections of specimens, often obtained through expeditions, had
earned him the nickname of ‘the monkey undertaker of Baltimore’ (Erikson 1981;
Haraway 1989: 205), recalled:
For field work a lot of time is saved today with modern transportation by jet-plane
and land rover car instead of by some slow tramp-steamer, dug-out canoe or on
foot, as on my first expeditions. In those adventurous early days no noteworthy
financial support could be obtained for such supposedly wild schemes, so we had
to live off the land on bananas, monkey liver, iguana tails and armadillos, roasted
in the shell, but we managed to bring back a lot of useful material and data,
besides malaria. (Schultz 1971: 14)

But more than these technical improvements, a changing view on ‘primitive societies’ was the largest incentive for seriously starting to study the nonhuman
primates from a human evolutionary perspective. This change did not only took
place in anthropological circles, but belonged to a much wider reconceptualization of the nature of humanity in the Western world. In the bitter aftermath

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of the Second World War when the devastating extent of the holocaust started
to be revealed, racist theories based on intrinsic hierarchies from savage to civilized became hard to upheld. Auschwitz, Birkenau and Treblinka made painfully
clear to which consequences such view of humanity could lead. If in the Unesco
age following the war humanity was no longer made up of superior and inferior
races (Haraway 1989: 197-203), it was hard to uphold that one group of humans
could be seen as representative of an ancestral stage of the other (Cartmill 1990;
Sperling 1991). Inferior races turned into non-western cultures, savage hordes became tribal bands, and primitive art evolved into high culture.
In anthropology, this changing perception is nowhere better illustrated than
in the words of Earnest Hooton, the single-most influential American physical
anthropologist of the 1940s (Haraway 1989: 204-5). Although much of his prewar work was unabashedly racist, in a remarkable paper published shortly after
his death he introduced a non-evolutionary perspective on foragers into this racial
discourse: ‘Contemporary savages,’ he declared, ‘are not “primitive,” not on the
evolutionary upgrade, not the stuff of which societal progress is made’:
I shall no doubt evoke the indignant disagreement of social anthropologists when
I suggest that more is to be learned about the genesis of the human family and the
beginning of social organization and community life in early man by the study
of contemporary infra-human primates living under natural conditions than by
the studies of retarded human groups living today under conditions variously
described as “primitive,” “uncivilized” or “savage.” (Hooton 1955: 7-8)

In the nineteenth century human foragers had been savage enough; after the war
they were no longer so. This meant that another source for imagining the human
past needed to be tapped. To Hooton, primates—and primates only—could provide clues about human evolution. He was sided by the prehistorian Slotkin who
believed it was logically and empirically invalid ‘to use generalizations from modern man [...] in interpreting the prehistory of other hominid forms’ and called for
‘a comparative study of the relevant processes in [...] the higher primates’ (1952:
442). According to Hooton, Carpenter’s field studies were far more instructive on
human evolution ‘than any of the stuff on present-day savages written by anthropologists’ (8). The halt in primate studies caused by the war was therefore much
to be regretted:
I know of no studies bearing upon man’s cultural and social origins that have
been begun so brilliantly, that have progressed so magnificently, and that have
been abandoned so miserably and ignominiously. It is as if one were to dig for oil,
strike a gusher, and then immediately cap it up and go away and forget about it.
Anthropology needs more studies of primate sociology. (Hooton 1955: 8)

Just like oil was the quintessential resource for modern North-American economics during the emergent Cold War, the nonhuman primate was the contested,
but crucial fuel for Western speculation about humanity in the postwar world.
Hooton’s words did not fall on deaf ears: one of his former students, Sherwood

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Washburn, would initiate the practical implementation of that suggestion and his
work would become the cornerstone of postwar American primatology (Haraway
1989: 204-223).
Yet Hooton’s paper was also essential in another respect, for it defined the very
term of ‘primatology’. Instead of ‘psychobiology’ (Yerkes) or ‘mammalian sociology’ (Zuckerman), Hooton (1955: 2) declared:
I shall fall back upon the use of the word “primatology.” This term, although
repellant and linguistically a hybrid, is redeemed if not legitimated by a dual
connotation: the study of the highest animal order and the study which of all the
-ologies is, or ought to be, primus, prime, or first in importance.10

It is no coincidence that the term primatology occurs in the same paper which called
for more primate studies to understand the process of human evolution.11 Postwar primatology, particularly in America, was first of all motivated by an interest in australopithecines rather than in apes. Had psychology been the originator of primate studies
in the prewar era, physical anthropology now took over the banner. The interest in the
human psyche became an interest in human evolution. A broadly felt change in the
postwar definition of humanity, ‘physical anthropology’s 1950s relocation of discourse
about primitivity onto monkeys and apes’ (Haraway 1989: 229) and the call of an evolutionary inspired science of primates under the flagship of ‘primatology’, these were
the ingredients out of which the first primate model for human behavioural evolution
would be distilled.
Washburn started his career as a Harvard physical anthropologist interested in the
functional anatomy of the primates and it was in that quality that he had participated
in the legendary Asiatic Primate Expedition of 1937 where Schultz shot gibbons for
dissection and Carpenter observed them for publication. Washburn assisted Schultz
with preparing the specimens and though he helped Carpenter for a couple of weeks, he
later recalled that ‘it was just the wrong time to expect me to shift gears from anatomy
to behavior’ (in DeVore 1992: 414-5). Instead, in subsequent years he worked hard to
integrate the new evolutionary synthesis which had been forged by Dobzhansky and
Simpson into physical anthropology (Washburn 1950; 1951). Sheer biometrical measurements could no longer do to explain primate anatomy as long as there was no genetic
understanding of morphological adaptations. Most importantly, Washburn urged to
replace the old concept of race by the new concept of population. This notion had been
central in the new evolutionary synthesis of genetics and Darwinism but Washburn
drew its implications for the biological study of humanity. To him, races were no longer
fixed categories but formed a continuum that had to be understood in terms of relative
degrees of gene frequency; differences between them were to be explained in terms of
10 It was a timely neologism which met with very little resistance among a new generation of researchers. Only a pre-war authority like Zuckerman (1981: 347) could find it a term which reflected
‘hazardous specialization’—a justified warning since all too often primates were studied as if they
were no part of the animal kingdom, but special organisms which demanded a different approach
(Richard 1981).
11 Slotkin’s (1952: 443) call to study primates instead of primitives used the term ‘comparative primatology’, indicating that the word primatology gained some acceptance in the first half of the 1950s.

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‘migration, drift, and selection’ (Washburn 1951: 299). He wrote emphatically: ‘Races
must be based on the study of populations. [...] It is not enough to state that races
should be based on genetic traits: races which can not be reconciled with genetics should
be removed from consideration’ (Washburn 1951: 299). Washburn was thus not simply
influenced by the ideological climate of the postwar years, but actively contributed to
the disqualification of racial hierarchies and their replacement by a more unified concept of humanity.
Motivated by Hooton and convinced that races were only populations,
Washburn started to think about the nonhuman primates as sources to learn about
the evolution of human behaviour. In the mid-fifties he steered his research in a
more behavioural direction. With hindsight, he has often attributed this change
to a lucky coincidence at the 1955 Pan-African Congress in Livingstone:
After the Congress [...] I arranged for a small collection of baboons. But much
more importantly, as it turned out, there were troops of baboons close to the
Victoria Falls Hotel where I was staying. The supply of baboons was irregular,
and I spent any extra time watching the local troops. This was so much more
rewarding that I closed out the collecting and spent my time watching the tame
baboons’ (Washburn 1983: 16).

From then on, he went to the nearby Wankie Game reserve and began ‘just looking at baboons instead of dissecting them’ (in DeVore 1992: 420). At the conference, Dart had presented his view on the osteodontokeratic culture but Washburn
wondered whether the differential body preservation was really to be accounted
for in cultural terms and began to study baboon behaviour (Washburn 1957).
Together with his research student Irven DeVore he observed troops of baboons
in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Kenya because he believed this could
enhance many of the questions concerning human evolution; the results of this
research programme will be discussed in the next section. The influence of people
like Hooton and Washburn can hardly be over-estimated. Hooton produced most
of the doctorates in physical anthropology before the war and his students would
take central positions in American academe, Washburn being one of them (Shapiro
1981; Spencer 1981). Of the first 19 doctoral degrees in modern primatology, 15
were supervised by Washburn (Gilmore 1981; Haraway 1989: 218, 222-3). The
intellectual pedigree runs from Hooton to Washburn to DeVore to most of the
practising primatologists in America nowadays (Loy and Peters 1991).
All ingredients for the preparation of a primate model were now in place. The
final thing which was needed, was a feeling, if the culinary metaphor may be further stretched, of hunger, i.e. the experience of an intellectual creux, a conceptual
void, a hiatus in our understanding or imaginative reconstruction. Early hominids from South-Africa had already whetted Hooton’s appetite, but the further
discovery of fossils by Louis and Mary Leakey in the Plio-Pleistocene layers of
Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania brought water to the mouth. They not only ripped
Dart’s controversial Taung child out of isolation, but begged for an imaginative
interpretation, being more ancient, more apelike and more ancestral than anything hitherto seen. The crucial find was that of ‘OH 5’ which Mary Leakey un-

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earthed in 1959. How was this enigmatic skull to be interpreted? To what sort of
being had it belonged? How were we to visualize the species it represented? In a
first attempt of coming to terms with this well-known case of ‘Leakey’s luck’, the
fossil was swamped with more names than any other fossil had hitherto received:
Zinj, Dear Boy, Nut-cracking Man, Zinjanthropus, Australopithecus boisei, etcetera. Even today, there is no fossil with such elaborate birth certificate as this one.
But name-giving, of course, was just a beginning.
The energetic and charismatic Louis Leakey believed that a better knowledge of extant great apes could help to clarify the fossils and living floors of early hominids. The
story has often been told of how he sent three young women with minor ethological
experiences and academic credentials to different species of great apes (Goodall 1971;
1990; Fossey 1983; Galdikas 1995; see also Cole 1975: 324-50; Kevles 1976; and particularly Morell 1995). Jane Goodall started her groundbreaking fieldwork at Gombe in
1960, Dian Fossey was sent to the mountain gorillas in Rwanda and Congo in 1966 and
Biruté Galdikas has been studying Bornean orang-utans since 1971. Goodall’s long-term
observations at Gombe revealed many unexpected behavioural patterns in the chimpanzee repertoire such as tool-use, meat-eating and hunting (Goodall 1986).12 Along with
the biomolecular demonstration of a close affinity between humans and chimpanzees,
this research opened the door for many speculations on human evolution. Due to his
discovery of ‘fossil men’ and his team of young women, Leakey was a much more seminal figure in the history of primate modelling than commonly acknowledged.
Both Washburn and Leakey were key-figures in the re-awakening anthropological
interest in primate behaviour after the war. Both were driven by a desire to gain a better understanding of human evolution. Their programme and that of their respective
students DeVore and Goodall gave directly or indirectly rise to the two main competing
primate models for human evolution, the baboon model and the chimpanzee model,
which will be discussed in the subsequent sections. In this sense, modern primatology
was at its origin the answer to a palaeoanthropological question. This is certainly true
for American primatology which, due to the intellectual legacy of Hooton, rose as part
of anthropology—with the important consequence that apes and monkeys were studied separately from other organisms (Richard 1981). It is less true for Europe where
primatology emerged within the classical ethological tradition as inaugurated by Niko
Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz with its focus on instinctive behaviour in jackdaws, geese

12 Tool-use by nonhuman primates was already well documented before World War II. Sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Jesuits had described chimpanzee tool use in the wild (Sept and Brooks 1994).
Lubbock knew that ‘monkeys use stones to break nuts’ (1870: 481). Darwin had seen a captive
orang-utan pounding the ground with a stone (Loy 1997). Köhler had already noted in the 1920s
that a laboratory chimpanzee ‘will lick up ants, or hold out a straw for the ants to crawl on and lick
them off’ (Kroeber 1928: 336, cf. Beck 1975).All this knowledge seems to have slipped through the
mazes of history; or else it was forgotten in the heroizing of Jane Goodall. Contrary to a wide-spread
belief, Goodall was not the first to describe chimpanzee tool use such as termite-fishing in the wild,
she was the first to do so since the inauguration of primatology after the Second World War.

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and sticklebacks (Lockard 1971; Roëll 1996; Fedigan and Strum 1997).13 Desmond
Morris (1967b: 6) rightly argued that British and continental primatologists ‘approached
monkeys and apes from the humbler side of the evolutionary scale, looking up at them
from simpler, less brainy species, rather than down from the dizzy behavioural heights
of man.’ Tinbergen founded an influential research school when he was in Oxford and
supervised individuals like Robert Hinde who supervised on his turn Thelma Rowell,
a forest baboon specialist. To them, the study of primates was a legitimate end in itself,
irrespective of any anthropological implications; monkeys and apes were part of the
animal kingdom, not hominids manqués. A similar motivation was also present in the
work of the Swiss zoologist Hans Kummer on hamadryas baboons (Kummer 1995).
Yet for better or worse, it turned out that those who worked on great apes, particularly chimpanzees, still got involved with issues of human evolution. Desmond Morris,
Adriaan Kortlandt, Vernon Reynolds and later also Jane Goodall (who worked with
Leakey in East-Africa but was supervised by Hinde in Cambridge) contributed to an
understanding of human evolution, though never through the emphasis of referential
model-building which typified American primatology. (Goodall’s data gave indirectly
rise to the chimpanzee model, but this was, as we will see, in first instance an invention
of American feminist anthropology, not hers.)14
The idea of primate modelling was a recent invention with a long prehistory
in medicine, zoology, psychology, and finally physical anthropology. Primates had
been used to tell something about modern human anatomy (Galen) and fossil
human anatomy (Darwin), but the relevance of their behaviour for human social
evolution was only explored after the Second World War. Why did it take so long?
A few factors can be indicated.

Converging circumstances
One of the key factors in the rise of primate modelling was the establishment of
evolutionary thought. In order to see nonhuman primates as instructive about
our own ancestors, one was of course greatly helped by the suggestion that we
descended from the same stock (Morris 1967b). Whether the precise mechanism
of that evolution was Darwinian natural selection or Lamarckian inheritance of
acquired characteristics was perhaps less important; what mattered was the acceptance of a simian descent of humanity. And this was largely established through the
Darwinist revolution in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
The idea of evolution alone, however, was not a sufficient cause; it took nearly
a century between the Darwinian revolution and the appearance of the first behavioural model based on baboons. One reason for this delay was the lack of relia13 The Dutch ethologist J.A.R.A.M. van Hooff, one of Tinbergen’s students at Oxford, recalled in a
recent interview: ‘I wanted to study primate behaviour but Tinbergen answered he knew nothing
of mammals. He found them too complex. He literally said: “If it hasn’t got fins or feathers, I know
nothing about it” ’ (in BIOnieuws, 8 November 1997: 4, my translation). It was Desmond Morris
who eventually brought Tinbergen in contact with ape research (cf. Van Hooff, forthcoming).
14 This distinction between postwar primatology in America and Europe echoes to a certain extent the
earlier discussion with Yerkes’ believing in the human relevance of primate studies and Zuckerman’s
abhorring such an idea.

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ble evidence on primate behaviour as the first field trips started only in the 1930s.
Basic difficulties of access and observation inhibited for a long time fieldwork in
the tropics and it is true that postwar primatology (and model-building) benefited
from many technical innovations in tropical medicine and transport. No matter
how real these problems were, they do not adequately explain the empirical delay as they could all have been overcome in the nineteenth century. In fact, they
were overcome at the time: travellers did penetrate into ‘the heart of darkness’
and if political and economic incentives were at stake the jungle could be crossed,
if never easily. The adventurer Paul du Chaillu succeeded in tracking gorillas to
shoot them, so why would it have been impossible to observe them? Fear certainly
played its part. In the case of Du Chaillu, no sooner had he spotted a group of gorillas, that he pulled the trigger. Du Chaillu observed primates through the barrel
of his gun; Garner through the bars of his iron cage. Yet the mixture of fear and
fascination was no different for great apes than for ‘head-hunters’—and they were
elaborately described by contemporaries.
If technical difficulties and collective fear do not fully account for the tardy
appearance of fieldwork, what else does? Perhaps it was not the brutish image of
primates which prevented fieldwork but the brutish image of primitives which
made it redundant. As said before, to the nineteenth-century evolutionist the savages were savage enough. One did not need to be a strong racist to believe that
sub-Saharan Africans were on a much lower scale than Europeans, that they were
bestial and that they, therefore, could serve as stand-ins for prehuman ancestors.
Perhaps it was the case that primates could not be studied, but they certainly did
not need to be studied with all this reliable information on human savageness
around. Even in zoos, where research facilities were easy and safe, only very few
studies on primate behaviour (apart from Darwin’s study of facial expressions)
were undertaken before Zuckerman in the 1930s.
It was only after the Second World War that one could no longer fall back on
modern foragers, as clearly expressed by the words of even a racist thinker like
Hooton and by the progressive disappearance of epithets such as ‘savage’ and
‘primitive’. On top of that, the fossils which were now being unearthed were so
much older and more ape-like that they made ethnographic parallels rather uninteresting. Compared to the Neanderthal or Java man, the primitive skulls like
Taung (1925), Zinjanthropus (1959) and Homo habilis (1964) nearly begged to
be compared with nonhuman primates, not just for anatomical study but also
for behavioural reconstruction. Once radiometric dating of sediments unveiled
surprisingly high ages of 1.8 Myr and older, it became necessary to consider that
primates as more promising sources of inspiration than foragers. In the postwar
world, ‘early man’ was ‘less like modern man gone wild than like a primate tamed’
(Fox 1975: 11).
It was this convergence of very ancient and ape-like fossils with a changing
perception of human foragers and the continuing prewar belief that apes were revealing of the human psyche which gave rise to the first interest in primate models
in the mid-1950s. The idea of primate-modelling was not born out of geniality
but out of necessity. It was a relatively obvious solution for the sociocultural and

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empirical problem human evolutionists and physical anthropologists faced in the
1950s. The method had proven successful in anatomy; now the challenge was to
apply it to behaviour.

Baboons
Brief reviews of the history of primate modelling usually reduce the succession of models based on baboons, social carnivores, geladas, chimpanzees and bonobos to an antagonistic confrontation between advocates of the baboon model and the chimpanzee
model (e.g. Reynolds 1976: 66-72; Tanner 1981: 19-22; Fedigan 1986; Kinzey 1987:
xii; Foley 1992; McGrew 1992: 199).15 The former are said to argue from an ecological
analogy: since baboons live in a savannah-like environment similar to the one inhabited by early hominids, their behavioural patterns must be alike. The latter are said to
base their inferences on a phylogenetic homology: since chimpanzees and humans are
genetically very close, behavioural similarities are due to common descent (homology)
rather than convergent adaptation to a similar environment (analogy). According to this
summary view of the debate, both models are responsible for two quite different images of the early human past: the baboon model stressed the role of male aggression and
dominance in human evolution, epitomized by the Man the Hunter scenario; whereas
the chimpanzee model unveiled a much more peaceful picture of primate social life
focusing on the mother-offspring bond and the economic centrality of females, thus
giving rise to Woman the Gatherer. Rather sweepingly, the baboon model has also been
associated with the postwar pessimism on human nature, whereas the popularity of the
chimpanzee model would reflect the flower-power idealism and second-wave feminism
of the early seventies.
Although this textbook view is essentially true, it is a rather simplified and
therefore unsatisfying version of the historical reality. Simplifying is the task of
a textbook, but the following sections will attempt to do more justice to that reality by showing some of its complexities and by dissecting the structure of the
analogical arguments put forward. Despite the number of reviews of the debate
on primate models (in fact, the parade of baboons, social carnivores, geladas and
chimps has become part of the undergraduate curriculum in physical anthropology), an analysis of their logical structure is still lacking (Fedigan 1986: 45). I will
respect the divisions of this procession in that the sections focus each on a specific
model and are more or less chronologically arranged. As in the two previous chapters my interest is first in ‘how’ the historical inferences are made rather than in
‘what’ they conclude, although here too the substantial side of the arguments will
not be entirely avoided.
But to return to the baboons. Critiques of the model have nearly always assumed that the savannah parallel laid at its root. ‘Ecological similarity is thus
the basis for the analogy,’ wrote Linda M. Fedigan (1982: 309) in her influential
review of primate models. Likewise, Susan Sperling (1991: 9) argued that ‘the
“baboonization” of early human life in such models rested on a savanna ecological analogy’. What was the result of this analogical reasoning according to its later
15 Fedigan (1982: 307-21) and Lewin (1984: 71-5) provide more detailed accounts of this debate.

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critiques? ‘The themes that emerged directly from the baboon model,’ Strum and
Mitchell (1987: 88) recount, ‘included: the adaptive nature of aggression, its use
and control through a male dominance hierarchy, the differences in roles between
males and females, and the relationship between aggression, dominance and reproductive success.’ By moving into an open environment with multiple predators, baboons and consequently early hominids had been forced to develop a rigid,
hierarchical social structure based on dominant males who protected the group
against outside predators and competed within the group for access to fertile females. The more dominant and aggressive an adult male baboon was, the more
mating opportunities and control over females he received.
This rather grim-looking portrayal of early human sociality is in many ways a
caricature view of earlier theories from the 1960s. It would be an exaggeration to
state that it was just a straw man erected to be knocked down in order to make the
chimpanzee model more plausible, but the truth is that both tenets of this account
(i.e. the ecological analogy and the centrality of male aggression) owe more to
popularizing books and textbooks of the late sixties and early seventies than to the
original articles of the baboon specialists published before. More than anything
else, it is the work of authors like Ardrey (1966; 1970), Morris (1967a), Tiger
and Fox (Tiger 1969; Tiger and Fox 1971) that must be held responsible for the
gloomy parallel between baboons and modern humans. Only there, the baboon
was ‘the most aggressive of subhuman primates’ whose ‘ways are so uncomfortably
reminiscent of man’s’ (Ardrey 1966: 228). It was only in general textbooks published some years later that baboons were used as a model for the past on the basis
of an ecological analogy (Campbell 1967; Birdsell 1972; Pfeiffer 1972).
Authors like Ardrey, Morris, Tiger, Fox, Birdsell, Campbell and Pfeiffer had
undertaken little or no fieldwork with baboons. They browsed through the publications of Washburn, DeVore and Hall to construe their arguments. Ardrey, for
example, regarded Washburn ‘as our greatest anthropologist’ (1970:16) and found
in Hall a ‘friend and counselor and drinking companion’ (Ardrey 1966: n.p.)
Although baboons were equally being observed by others like Kummer (1968),
Rowell (1966) and the Altmanns (1970), their work received far less attention
from the science writers—partly because it did not draw implications about human evolution, partly because it offered a more moderate image of baboons.
Rowell’s forest baboons did not defend the troop against predators but fled away
in the trees; Kummer’s hamadryas baboons had no male dominance hierarchy but
stable one-male units instead. Washburn, on the other hand, did explicitly speculate on the origin of man, and DeVore and Hall’s seminal descriptions of baboon
social life focused on aggression and male dominance (DeVore and Hall 1965;
Hall and DeVore 1965).

Washburn’s baboons: from typical primates to terrestrial specialists
In a number of articles published between 1958 and 1968 Washburn, each time
accompanied by a second author (once Avis, twice DeVore), developed his ideas
about the use of nonhuman primates in evolutionary research. These were the
very first attempts at using extant primates in the reconstruction of early hominid

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behaviour. A close reading shows how little of his arguments were based on an
ecological analogy. He even never used the term ‘model’ when talking about the
relevance of baboons, nor did he transfer notions of male aggression and dominance to early hominids. In fact, there was considerable interest for themes which
modern commentators would more rapidly associate with chimpanzee research in
the 1970s, such as play, mother-child relations and the almost entirely vegetarian diet of the baboon. These findings are so different from the received view of
Washburn, as promulgated by his epigones, that the original texts deserve further
inspection.

The quest for differences
In the introduction of their 1958 paper ‘Evolution of human behavior’, Sherwood
Washburn and Virginia Avis realized that the problem of human evolution had
been ‘greatly clarified by recent fossil discoveries and new techniques of dating
and analysis’ (Washburn and Avis 1958: 421). The australopithecine finds from
Africa shed important new light on human evolution, but a genuine interpretation of ‘the origin of human nature’ could be undertaken ‘only with the aid of
imaginative reconstruction’ (422).
How was such ‘imaginative reconstruction’ to be done? In the line of what
Hooton had predicted, the authors believed that an understanding of nonhuman
primates could ‘enrich our interpretations of the bones’ (422):
much of human behaviour is shared with many other primates, and a general
view of the origin of human nature from an evolutionary point of view must
describe these features held in common as well as those which differentiate man.
(421)

Yet since the similarities between humans and simians had been repeatedly described, Washburn and Avis choose to emphasize instead ‘the origin of those features differentiating man from ape’ (421, italics added). Their devise was straightforward: look at humans and primates, list the differences between them and
explain these in terms of human adaptations. To them, nonhuman primates functioned as stationary creatures from which the human branch had sprouted; they
believed indeed that ‘many of the living forms [of nonhuman primates] have
changed far less than has man’ (422). Human evolution had started there where
nonhuman primate evolution had stopped. In the run towards humanity, extant
primates provided the starting point, ‘modern man’ the end point, and the differences between them the stakes of hominization. The assumption that the nonhuman primate was more conservative than the human primate lay at the base of
their (and many others’) ‘imaginative reconstruction’.
The body of their paper consisted of three parts: a comparison between monkeys, apes and ‘man’, a discussion of australopithecine fossils and a tentative sequence of the evolution of human behaviour. The first section listed the available
evidence, even if it was ‘of very different caliber’ (421), on themes like reproduction and growth, social group, special senses, brain, locomotion, posture, and

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movement. The information, neatly arranged in three columns for monkeys, apes
and ‘man’, was largely anatomical since little was known about behaviour. Most
evidence came from prewar authorities like Yerkes, Zuckerman, Hooton and
Schultz; the only field study referred to was Carpenter’s 1940 work on the gibbon.
As a result of this comparison, bipedalism, tool use, large brain size and language
stood out as ‘the factors differentiating between the human way of life and that of
the ape’ (421). They accounted for the appearance of unique human traits such
as slow maturation, increased infant dependency, canine reduction, large territory
and male provisioning. Hunting was not mentioned in the tables, but the authors
believed that ‘man is clearly distinguished from all living monkeys and apes by being much more carnivorous, hunting and killing large animals’ (432).
The next step was to determine when these crucial attainments had been reached in
the course of human evolution. The finds of australopithecines in South-Africa by Dart,
Broom and Robinson provided a good starting point (Tobias 1985). Washburn’s study of
the pelves convinced him ‘that these can only be reconstructed as belonging to a bipedal
animal’ (429). Repeating an old argument already suggested by Darwin, they believed
that considerable reduction in australopithecine canine teeth in comparison to monkeys
and apes made it ‘quite probable that they were using tools’ (430).16 Australopithecine
brain size was still very small, which explained the absence of ‘tool making according to
defined traditions’ (432). Did the australopithecines hunt? This question could only be
answered by archaeological evidence but Washburn and Avis said: ‘Our belief is that the
australopithecines were mainly vegetarian but had begun to supplement their diet with
more animal food than is characteristic for the apes’ (433). Full hunting only developed
with the emergence of large-brained creatures of the Middle Pleistocene, as represented
by the fossils of Trinil and Zhoukoudian.
The resulting evolutionary narrative consisted of two stages. With Australopithecus
we had a bipedal, small-brained, tool-using and largely vegetarian hominid which had
moved into the savannahs, whereas increased brain size, complex technology, articulate speech and hunting of large mammals only developed with the hominids of the
Middle Pleistocene which we would now call Homo erectus. The motor behind this
drastic transition was hunting. Washburn and Avis described how hunting ‘had three
important effects on human behaviour and human nature: psychological, social, and
territorial’ (433). With hunting, man started to ‘enjoy the chase and the kill’; he became
also economically responsible through sharing the prey in the group while his territory
was greatly increased. Hunting was the key behaviour adaptation in human evolution;

16 Washburn and Avis are rather ambiguous about the function of early tools. In one place, australopithecine tools are said to be defensive weapons (430); in another, they might have been part of the
hunting equipment (432); still further, they were ‘probably used to extend the quantity and variety
of this [vegetable food] rather than to obtain meat’ (433). Tools could have been used for fighting,
hunting or ‘digging, crushing, and tearing things open’ (433)—the latter option would become the
feminists’ favourite (cf. infra).

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hunting was what made us human.17 This is to be taken quite literally: in the article the
australopithecines are still referred to as ‘animals’ or ‘forms’, whereas the hunters of the
Middle Pleistocene are called ‘men’. Human evolution was thus ‘the change from some
animal such as Australopithecus to the primitive men of the middle Pleistocene’ (432).
What was the role of the nonhuman primates in this article? Clearly, no single
species was cast as a model for human evolution or for any specific stage of their
evolutionary reconstruction. In fact, the nonhuman primates preceded the australopithecines at the start of human evolution, but even then not as abstract prototypes. ‘The search for the unspecialized common ancestor,’ Washburn (1950:
69-70) had written before, ‘becomes either a denial of evolution or a hunt for an
illusory, philosophical archetype.’ Washburn and Avis looked at modern primates
(or what was known about them) to detect the differences with humans. The
process of evolution could be known by the subtraction of modern humans minus
modern nonhuman primates. Monkeys and apes on the one hand and humans on
the other served as two clothes-pegs between which the line of hominization was
hung. In this sense, their method did not proceed by analogy but resembled the
programme set forward by an influential paper published a couple years before
by the zoologists Bartholomew and Birdsell. In order to study the ecology of the
‘protohominids’, they urged ‘to extrapolate upward from ecological data on other
mammals and suggest the biological attributes of the protohominids and to extrapolate downward from ethnological data on hunting and collecting peoples and
suggest the minimal cultural attributes of the protohominids’ (Bartholomew and
Birdsell 1953: 481). This ‘sandwich’ approach to human evolution would remain
a popular alternative to referential models.
The only hint of referential modelling in Washburn’s first paper came from a
surprising angle: carnivores. The pleasure in hunting other animals was ‘strikingly
similar to that of many carnivores, and no parallel behavior has been observed
among wild primates. [...] If one watches baboons in one of the great African
game reserves, one sees that they move unconcernedly among a great variety of
animals, and it is only when large carnivores appear that the animals react [by
fighting and fleeing] as they do to man’ (433). Although Washburn had already
observed baboons in Africa, by the time this paper was written, he saw them more
as apprehensive than representative of humans. Social carnivores, on the other
17 So much has been written about the centrality of hunting in evolutionary scenarios of the 1950s
and 60s that it has become part of the standard history of anthropology (see Perper and Schrire
1977; Haraway 1989: 206-17; and especially Cartmill 1993: 1-27). From Dart’s speculations in the
1950s about the belligerent and bloodthirsty nature of the australopithecines, over Ardrey’s dramatic
popularizations of this theory (Ardrey 1961; 1976) to the extreme contributions of the Man the
Hunter conference (Washburn and Lancaster 1968; Laughlin 1968), the hunting hypothesis has
been criticized since the 1970s. The famous Man the Hunter conference, held in Chicago in 1966,
signalled not so much the start of the hunting hypothesis but its vociferous apex. The papers by
Laughlin, Washburn and Lancaster in the resulting volume (Lee and DeVore 1968) were the most
explicit defences of the idea that hunting had made us human, but the volume also contained the
germs for a refutation of this idea, notably in the contribution by one of the co-editors: Lee’s study
on the !Kung San showed that hunting played only a minor role in the subsistence economy of these
supposedly archetypical hunter-gatherers. Lee would later call the volume ‘mistitled’ (Lee 1979:
16).

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hand, resembled humans in the ‘economic responsibility of the adult males and
the practice of sharing food in the group’ (434). Consequently, ‘the very same actions which caused man to be feared by other animals led to more cooperation,
food sharing, and economic dependence within the group’ (434). Aggression,
only mentioned once in the paper, was not inherent to the primate repertoire but
originated with the hunting habit: ‘carnivorous curiosity and aggression have been
added to the inquisitiveness and dominance striving of the ape’ (434).
Contrary to the received view, in this early Washburn paper primates did not
serve as a model which injected doses of aggression, hierarchy and sexual politics
into our view of human origins. Hunting, often seen as the result of the baboon
model, was already Washburn’s major explanatory principle well before ‘studies
of groups of living primates emerged as a major capstone to his academic edifice’
(Haraway 1989: 217-8). It served to account for the more recent changes in human evolution (not the whole process of hominization), and it was more readily
associated with a carnivore model (not a baboon model).

Baboons at the lower limit
Three years after the ‘Evolution of human behavior’ appeared, Washburn published an article together with his graduate student Irven DeVore (Washburn and
DeVore 1961). In the meantime, both had been doing fieldwork with olive baboons in national parks in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Kenya, observations which had taught them more than that baboons ran away from humans
and other carnivores (this work formed the core of DeVore’s Ph.D. thesis from
1962 on the social organization of baboons). In 1961 the time was ripe ‘to present
a brief account of the daily life of baboons to serve as a background for the discussion of the social life of early man’ (91) and this was exactly what the ‘Social
behavior of baboons and early man’ did.
At first sight, the differences with the 1958 paper could not have been greater.
The sweeping statements on primates had turned into detailed descriptions of
baboons; the emphasis on anatomy had changed into an exclusive attention to
behaviour. Was the 1958 paper a theoretical speculation on human evolution,
the 1961 publication looked like an ethnography of a primate society with only
limited larger implications. Despite this initial impression, the paper shows profound similarities with earlier work; both the aim, method and conclusions closely
resembled the previous article.
The ultimate aim of Washburn and his co-author consisted of interpreting
the course of human evolution and ‘reconstructing the social life of early man’
(95). To this end, they used the same comparative reasoning as before. Focusing
on themes like troop size, range, diet and population structure, the behaviour of
the baboons was compared with ‘preagricultural humans’ (102) and with what
was known about fossil hominids. Some general similarities were noted (e.g. in
troop size) but in general the authors ‘tried to outline some of the ways in which
the way of life of contemporary baboons differs from that of man’ (103). These
differences, eventually summarized in a table at the end of their paper (figure 14),
served to point out what was distinctively human. Unlike the baboons, humans

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had a much larger territory with home bases, a carnivorous component to their
diet, an avoidance of inbreeding, an extended mother-child bond, an increased
economic dependency of the infant, a prolonged male-female relationship, a reduced dominance and the faculty of speech. These differences were to be interpreted in terms of human evolution: ‘because of the great behavioral gap between
man and his nearest relatives, some reconstruction of behavior is possible’ (103).
As in 1958, many of these patterns emerged as direct or indirect consequences to
hunting. ‘The basis for most of these differences may lie in hunting,’ they wrote in
a more popular article in Scientific American published the same year (1961b: 19).
The Middle Pleistocene was again the turning point in human evolution: ‘By the
Middle Pleistocene there is direct evidence of hunting and indirect evidence for
co-operation, division of labor, and sharing of food. This human pattern differs
on each of these points from that of baboons, who do not hunt, share, or co-operate, and where there is no sexual division of economic activity’ (98).
Their final conclusion recaptures the earlier ideas of Washburn and it is worth
quoting their entire last paragraph:
We see two stages of behavioral evolution separating the apes from Homo sapiens.
The first of these is that of the australopithecines of the Lower Pleistocene. Although
these forms were bipedal and tool-making [contra 1958], there is little to suggest
that their social life was very different from that of apes or monkeys. They were
probably primarily vegetarian, and the small-brained young could have matured
rapidly. Perhaps only the rudiments of the human way of life were present. But, by
the Middle Pleistocene, large-brained men who hunted big animals were present,
and this may well have been the period during which the distinctively human
attitudes on hunting, territory, and the family originated. At least the biological
and economic problems that ultimately led to the social customs of today had their
roots in the hunting societies of half a million years ago. (103)

From the previous passage it is clear that baboons did not serve as referential models
on the basis of ecological analogy. They were used to highlight, through contrast, a set
of unique human traits. As little was known about the variability of primate behaviour,
patterns of baboon behaviour were thought to be prototypical. The Scientific American
audience could read that ‘baboon characteristics [...] may be taken as representative of
ape and monkey behavior in general’ (Washburn and DeVore 1961b: 18-9). Washburn
and DeVore believed that the main points of their comparison ‘would not be greatly
changed by substituting other nonhuman primate species for baboons’ (1961a: 103).
Baboon behaviour was prototypical primate behaviour, not an adaptation to a specific
environment. The word ‘ecology’ did not even occur in the whole paper! To put it unceremoniously, in 1961 it did not even matter whether baboons lived in savannahs,

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Figure 14. Washburn and DeVore initially studied baboons as representative of a primate
pattern prior to hominization. In this table, they juxtaposed evidence on baboons and preagricultural humans in order to indicate the extent of human uniqueness (Washburn and DeVore
1961: 102).

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woodlands or forests.18 They were just a concrete example of the generic primate picture
as outlined in 1958. Consequently, baboons were not living representatives for one of
the two stages of the evolutionary scenario but preceded them as prototypical representatives of the simian substrate from which humanity had started. Australopithecus
retained much of their rudimentary social life, whereas Homo erectus more closely resembled modern hunter-gatherers.
Not only were baboons absent as referential models, even the carnivores became more doubtful for the job. Though they shared food like human hunters,
because of its greater communities ‘the human situation was far more complicated
socially than that of other carnivores’ (100). As ‘no comparable situation exists
among other carnivores’ (100), the authors refrained from looking for further
modern analogues for this ‘new social problem’ (101). As such, the 1961 paper
eradicated all referential modelling.
The portrait of the baboon that arose from Washburn and DeVore’s description is nearly angelical compared to its later caricature. Although ‘the readiness
to eat meat is present’, their diet is ‘overwhelmingly vegetarian’ (94). Instead of
aggression, ‘play is an important activity, which occupies many hours every day’
(96). Consort pairings are said to ‘last a matter of hours or days and usually dissolve peacefully,’ the odd fight notwithstanding (97). In general, however, ‘fighting within the troop seldom occurs, because the position of each animal is recognized’ (100). These quotes are not the result of selective reading; they just show
how distorted the later reconstructions are.
When it came to Washburn and DeVore’s views on the human past, male hunting
was indeed seen as more important than female economic activity, at least in diachronic
perspective, i.e. in terms of its impact on human evolution.19 Later critics, however, have
failed to notice how hunting ‘required that co-operation and sharing increase and that
dominance become less important in social control’ (101). Instead of more, according
to Washburn and DeVore, we got less dominance in human evolution as a consequence
of hunting! Co-operation, food sharing, food transport, home bases, gathering—all
these so-called later correctives to the hunting hypothesis are present in Washburn’s
early work. Although the leading principle was that ‘man’s success comes from hunting’
(92), the connotations of aggression and dominance were not associated with this early
version of the baboon model.

18 The work of Thelma Rowell (1966) would later demonstrate that the behaviour of forest-living
baboons was quite different from the savannah baboons observed by Washburn and DeVore but it
never received attention from a primate-modelling perspective, partly because ecological analogy
became more important in the late 1960s (their forest habitat was thus considered irrelevant to
the hominid savannah), partly because their behavioural patterns responded less to the notion of
aggression that became prevalent in the late 1960s and early 70s. They thus lived in the wrong
environments and performed the wrong behaviours.
19 In synchronic perspective, the importance of gathering and the vegetable component of the diet
was widely acknowledged but this was thought to entail little evolutionary consequence. As Donna
Haraway (1989: 217) poignantly observed: ‘Gathering is about local foods; hunting is about universal principles.’

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Living australopithecines
If the 1961 article looked very different but turned out to be very similar to its
predecessor, our next paper shows the exact opposite. Published by DeVore and
Washburn in 1963, its extensive descriptions of baboon life looked very much like
the previous publication, but the underlying rationale for studying baboons was
quite different.
The article ‘Baboon ecology and human evolution’ opens with the observation that these animals are ‘the most successful ground-living primates, and their
way of life gives some insight into the problems which confronted early man’
(335). The intention of the authors was no longer to present an account of human evolution (their two-staged view of the matter was presented in the introduction as a taken-for-granted with hunting as the key adaptation); now they were
interested in ‘the problems which confronted early man’. Once a gradual ascent
from the apes, human evolution has now all of a sudden become a problematic
and contested struggle. The new word was ‘survival’, the new paradigm ‘ecology’,
the new unit of analysis ‘the group’. The understanding of behaviour in terms of
its environmental parameters became so dominant that studies on baboon social
organization started to be called ‘baboon ecology’ (the phrase occurred in several
titles; cf. DeVore and Washburn 1963; DeVore and Hall 1965 and Altmann and
Altmann 1970).
Consequently, the baboon was no longer the spokesperson for the other 200odd species of nonhuman primates. In the first pages of the article, DeVore and
Washburn distinguished for the first time between different species of baboons
and contrasted the genus Papio with other genera of monkeys, thus indicating the
extent of behavioural variation. If baboons were specific instead of generalized
what could further justify them as a source for analogy? The answer was simple:
because they lived on the ground. Not because they lived in savannahs or because
they practised hunting, but simply this: the habit of shuffling, running, feeding,
playing, copulating, fighting and dying on the ground. ‘Aside from man, these
monkeys are the most successful ground-living primates,’ DeVore and Washburn
held (1963: 335). A terrestrial life-style inevitably led to a greater evolutionary
flexibility, following the maxim: ‘the more ground-living, the less speciation’
(337). Since ‘the men of the Middle Pleistocene, genus Homo, occupied the same
range as the baboon-macaques without speciation’ and since ‘Australopithecus may
have occupied an adaptive position midway in effectiveness between the ground
monkeys and early Homo’, the sequence from baboons to australopithecines to
early Homo could be safeguarded as in 1961. Baboons were no longer representative of other nonhuman primates, but terrestriality and lack of speciation got
them back in evolutionary reconstruction by the back door.

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With this new emphasis on survival and terrestriality, the leading research
question became: to what extent are behavioural and anatomical patterns the result of ‘adaptations to life on the ground’ (342) in a predator-rich environment?
Many of the earlier observations were now re-interpreted in function of ecology
and survival. Was play once considered to build ‘social skills’ in 1961 (96), now it
gave males ‘fighting practice’ (347). Was the position of each animal recognized
in the troop in 1961, two years later ‘interadult male antagonism’ reigned (347).
Male dominance, sexual dimorphism and social hierarchy were all described in
terms of terrestrial adaptations.
The most typical example of this new approach was DeVore and Washburn’s description of how baboons moved in the open, treeless plains: subdominant males and
older juvenile males walked out in front of the troop and at its rear end; between them
came pregnant and estrus females as well as juveniles; in the centre you found a nucleus
of dominant males, females with infants and young juveniles. In case of predator attack,
such arrangement insured ‘maximum protection for the infants and juveniles in the
center of the troop’ (344). This interpretation epitomizes the ecological approach: social
behaviour was seen as an adaptation to certain ecological pressures (predation), it was
described in terms of age groups and sex classes, and it ultimately contributed to group
survival. The study of the baboons’ marching order became paradigmatic for this new
ecological approach to primatology and found its place in many textbooks—regardless
of the fact that it had already been described as early as 1623.20
In general, baboon behaviour was interpreted through a military and martial metaphor. The social group, significantly called the ‘troop’, had become the unit of evolution.21
Each troop disposed of a ‘home range’ with a ‘core area’, roamed by inimical predators.
‘Survival’ was its only purpose: ‘Sex differences, peripheral animals, and range—each
of these has meaning only in terms of the survival,’ DeVore and Washburn argued
(366). Its social structure resembled a military hierarchy with well prescribed functions
based on ‘age, sex, personal preferences, and dominance’ (342): the less dominant adult
males and juveniles defended the moving troop like soldiers in the firing line, whereas
the dominant adult males protected the helpless mothers and young infants inside the
troop. Food shortage and finding safe sleeping trees were the troop’s logistical problems.
The alternation between resting under trees and moving in battle-array through exposed

20 Richard Jobson wrote: ‘But to speake of the Babowne, I must say, it is a wonderfull thing [...] as
they travell, they goe in rancke, whereof the leaders are certaine of the greater sort, and there is as
great, and large of them, as a Lyon, the smaller following, and ever now and then as a Commaunder
a great one walkes; the females carry their yong under their bellies. [...] In the rear comes up a great
company of the biggest sort, as a guard against any persuing enemy, and in this manner doe they
march along’ (quoted in Yerkes and Yerkes 1929: 9).
21 The troop was seen as the level where selective pressures where at work, unlike more recent views
which consider the individual or the gene as the unit of evolution (Gilmore 1981; Ghiglieri 1987).
‘The group is an adaptive unit, the actual form of which is determined by ecological pressures’
(Gartlan 1968: 115). DeVore (1965: ix) defined the troop as follows: ‘A “troop” so defined consists
of a discrete group of adults of both sexes, together with juveniles and infants, that maintains
social identity and spatial unity over long periods. Such a troop is an easily recognizable unit with
relatively impermeable social boundaries, although young males or groups of young males may live
outside the troop.’

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country reminded of troop movements in war. Baboon social structure seemed like a
well-oiled battle-machine in the land forces of the East-African savannah.
The resulting baboon image was considerably different from the previous paper by Washburn and DeVore and seems more familiar to us today. Baboons were
‘more aggressive and dominance-oriented’ (336) than other monkeys. Between
a troop and its predators, between different troops, but mostly within the troop
itself, aggression was the organizing principle and dominant males formed the
pivot of the troop. ‘The role of adult male baboons as defenders of the troop [was]
vital to the survival of the troop, and especially to the survival of the most helpless animals—females with new babies, small juveniles, and temporarily sick or
injured individuals’ (346). Some years later, Hall and DeVore (1965: 54) began
their study of baboon social organization with the axiomatic phrase: ‘The baboon
group is organized around the dominance hierarchy of adult males.’ Male aggression, male dominance and male defence—these were the fixed parameters of
baboon behaviour. The article of DeVore and Washburn contained a picture of a
threatening adult male baboon which more than anything else summarized and
disseminated this new view (figure 15).
But how about hunting? It is tempting to see DeVore’s and Washburn’s detailed
descriptions of hunting episodes as another symptom of a change in their perception of baboons. In 1961, they spent only two sentences on baboon hunting (‘A
small live animal in the grass will also be killed and eaten. We saw two newborn
Thompson’s gazelle, two half-grown hares, and three nestlings of ground-nesting birds killed in this way’, p. 94); in 1963, these same episodes were good for
more than four, juicy pages (‘An adult male baboon grabbed it, brought it above
its head, and slammed it to the ground. He immediately tore into the stomach of
the gazelle and began eating it.’ p. 360). These appetizing scenes notwithstanding,
baboons were still described as ‘very inefficient predators’ (362) and their attitude
towards other animals was ‘not that of a predator’ (363). Since ‘the importance
of meat in the baboon diet has been considerably overstressed’, Washburn and
DeVore found it more reasonable ‘to assume that meat has been a consistent but
very minor part of the baboon diet throughout their evolutionary history’ (363).
Hunting remained the human prerogative par excellence.
What role did the baboons finally play in the reconstruction of human evolution? DeVore and Washburn (365) were very clear about this:
Obviously, man is not descended from a baboon, and the behavior of our ancestors
may have been very different from that of living baboons. But we think that in a
general way the problems faced by the baboon troop may be very similar to those
which confronted our ancestors. At the least, comparison of human behavior with
that of baboons emphasizes differences. At the most, such a comparison may give
new insights.

This dual employment can be clearly seen in the text. First, many passages
remind of the ‘comparative’, difference-seeking method of the two previous papers. Baboons are thus said to have more closed societies, larger troop sizes and
greater population densities in comparison with humans. ‘With the coming of

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Figure 15. Male dominance and aggression come together in this emblematic picture of a
young adult male baboon displaying his canine teeth (DeVore and Washburn 1963: figure 6).
This powerful image was reprinted in Campbell’s undergraduate textbook on human evolution
(1967: 274). Similar photographs appeared in Hall and DeVore’s classic baboon study (Hall
and DeVore 1965: 58-9), in Pfeiffer’s handbook on human evolution (1972: 239) and in the
popular Time volume on the primates (Eimerl and DeVore 1965: 59, 117). The latter picture
even inspired the cover illustration for the Penguin edition of Marais’ The Soul of the Ape
(1969). The aggressive baboon image was thus widely disseminated over the Western world. If
you hadn’t observed baboons in Africa yourself, the message inherent in this illustration was
clear.

man, every category is fundamentally altered. [...] Some measure of how different
the new directions are may be gained from the study of the ecology of baboons’
(366). Next to this ‘minimal’ approach, the ‘projective’ method provides new insights by projecting baboon ecology back onto a specific period. Here, baboons
no longer precede the known fossil species but start to represent certain known,
particularly older stages. In a section on australopithecines, the authors write: ‘It
may be possible to reconstruct more of this stage in human evolution with a more
thorough study of the ecology of baboons’ (338). Their discussion on scavenging,

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a subject ‘so important, especially in the interpretation of the deposits in which
Australopithecus is found’ (364), explores this second approach.
It seemed reasonable that scavenging once was an important phase in human
evolution, but observations in the field taught them the opposite: there were far
fewer kills than expected (the lion-baboon ratio was 1:100); most kills by predators were made and consumed at night; if anything was left, lions would usually
stay nearby the meat during the day; and baboons did not take the slightest interest in the rare cases they ran into a ‘safe’ kill (364-5). DeVore and Washburn concluded that their ‘opinion of the importance of scavenging has changed through
observation of the actual situation at the kills’ (366). This exercise was the first use
of baboons as genuine analogues for australopithecines.
Since baboons and australopithecines are both terrestrial animals (observed
similarity), the absence of scavenging with the former could be extrapolated towards the latter (predicted similarity). But how strong was the claim that ‘the
scavenging theory is not supported by the evidence’ (364)? The many differences
between baboons and australopithecines (relevant dissimilarities), such as bipedalism and incipient tool-use, weakened the argument. There was no necessary link
between ground-living and the absence of scavenging (weak relevance of similarity). On top of that, the observed similarity was vague (ground-living can be
done in many environments). Observations took place in only two national parks
(limited number and variety of source contexts), where the predator-baboon ratio
might have been very different from past environments. The conclusion was not
tested nor falsified. Considering the logical obstacles this first primate model ran
into, it should not come as a surprise that australopithecine scavenging has been
a bone of contention ever since.
In the papers written by Washburn and his co-authors between 1958 and 1963,
we see three attempts to use nonhuman primates in the reconstruction of human evolution. Initially based on generalized statements about monkeys and apes,
speculations on human evolution came to invoke contemporary baboons, first
as prototypical primates (Strier 1994), later as terrestrial specialists. The baboon
shifted from a lower limit of human evolution to a referential model for early australopithecines. In the first case, the method was comparative and looked for differences; in the second case, it was projective and looked for similarities. Parallel
to the shift from a comparison to an analogy, the baboon took on the role of the
malicious, malevolent, aggressive primate.
Before studying the consequences of this shift, we need to understand its causes. The early 1960s witnessed a tremendous increase in naturalistic field studies
on monkey and apes (cf. the compilations by Buettner-Janusch 1962; DeVore
and Lee 1963; DeVore 1965 and S. Altmann 1967), which certainly affected
the above-sketched change in approach. In 1963, DeVore and Lee could already
compile a list of nearly fifty contemporary field studies on nonhuman primates,
on species ranging from tree shrews to gorillas (DeVore and Lee 1963). However,
about half of the studies focused on macaques and baboons so that a more encompassing understanding of variability in primate behaviour beyond the cercopithecine realm was not yet realized (figure 16). If one wanted to undertake a

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Figure 16. This graph, compiled by Stuart Altmann (1967: figure 1), shows how the increase
in primate studies during the early 1960s was by and large limited to baboons and macaques,
resulting in ‘the myth of the typical primate’ (Strier 1994)

comparative study on primate tool use, like Kortlandt and Kooij (1963) did, it
was still necessary to rely on questionnaires sent to zookeepers and field biologists
to document variability. More started to be known about primates but data did
not accumulate so rapidly that it could overthrow Washburn’s argument on the
baboon’s representativeness in just a few years time. On the contrary, ‘concepts
about primate society were, for many years, actually generalizations about baboon
society’ (Strum and Mitchell 1987: 89).
A much more important reason for the change in emphasis between 1961 and 1963
lies in the minor detail of authorship: in 1963, DeVore was the first author and he kept
different ideas on the study and relevance of baboons.22 Washburn observed baboons
largely irrespective of their environment; for DeVore this was untenable. In this, he was
strongly influenced by the socioecological work of K.R.L. Hall whose ‘notion of an
adaptive relationship between social organization and environment rapidly became a focus for syntheses of primate field research, and the demonstration of this relationship in
specific instances became the goal of many field studies’ (Richard 1981: 518). Primate
behaviour, i.e. the social structure of the group, could only be understood through primate ecology. The most influential overview was given by Crook and Gartlan (1966)
in Nature who distinguished between five adaptive grades of primate behaviour, each
one ‘intimately linked to species ecology’ (1200). Since the environment dictated behavioural adaptation, the terrestrial similarity between baboons and australopithecines
was a relevant base for analogy: under a given ecology (understood as the conditions of
22 The 1963 paper was one of the rare in Washburn’s career where he was not the first author, which
really indicates the extent of DeVore’s contribution to it.

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food availability, food dispersion and predator pressure) only a very limited number of
adaptations were possible, even in phylogenetically distant species such as baboons and
australopithecines.
DeVore was responsible for this change in approach. When five years later
Washburn, together with C.S. Lancaster, wrote his classical and often-quoted version of the hunting hypothesis for the Man the Hunter volume, he abstained from
directly applying baboons to human prehistory (Washburn and Lancaster 1968).
Although the baboon studies and the hunting hypothesis are often bracketed together—undoubtedly because of their mutual reliance on male dominance and
aggression—the baboon model was not essential to it. Indeed, the hunting hypothesis existed already well before Washburn started looking at baboons and its
largest impact was rather on the carnivore model. DeVore and Washburn called
baboons ‘very inefficient predators’. The only references to extant nonhuman primates in Washburn’s Man the Hunter contribution paper were again of the sort
of ‘general differences with man’, comparable to his earlier work. DeVore, on the
other hand, continued to study baboons and published two standard articles together with Hall (DeVore and Hall 1965; Hall and DeVore 1965) but the ambition to shed light on human evolution was entirely absent here. By the mid-sixties baboons had become legitimate objects of study in their own. In the work
of DeVore we see the emancipation of primatology as an autonomous discipline
from its initial background in human evolution research (DeVore 1965).
The projective baboon model as it first emerged in the 1963 paper was thus
the result of the two rather distinct preoccupations of its authors: Washburn’s ambition to shed light on human evolution and DeVore’s perspective on ecology as
the key to understanding behaviour. It was this convergent mixture which would
become the basis for later articulations of the baboon model and the target for all
subsequent critiques. And, as so often with original and provocative work, it was
lauded and despised at the same time.
Washburn returned to general statements, DeVore no longer drew implications on
human evolution, Hall had never attempted to do this. The baboons were now in the
hands of non-specialists.23

The canonization of the baboon model
Imagine a lay person in the early 1970s who is interested in human biology and
evolution and wants to know more about it. He would go to a library or a bookshop and pick up from the shelves a best-seller like Ardrey’s Territorial Imperative
(1966) or Morris’ Naked Ape (1967a). If passionately devoted, he might even go
through some of the recent undergraduate textbooks which made the scientific
23 A younger generation of baboon experts like the Altmanns and Rowell also studied baboons in their
own right. The moment baboons started to be systematically studied, they were no longer staged as
living ancestors by their observers. Just like Spencer and Gillen’s intensive fieldwork with the Arunta
made clear at the turn of the century that foragers were quite complex and could not simply be used
for evolutionist projection, the baboon studies of the late 1960s which documented the variability of
primate behaviour problematized the straightforward use of these animals as palaeoanthropological
models.

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debate of the last decade accessible and comprehensible. In any case, our keen
reader will trust that what he consults is an accurate, though simplified, reflection
of the state of the art. This, however, was not the case.
To understand all subsequent debates on primate modelling requires to understand the role of textbooks and popular-science publishing in the early 1970s.

The dark side of the baboon
A number of books published in the late 1960s forged the observations of
Washburn, DeVore and Hall into a grim caricature of baboon life. Take, for example, the image presented in the work of the former American playwright Robert
Ardrey, whose dramatic prose always makes for good quotation:
The student of man, perturbed by the future of human warfare, by the apparently
inviolate laws of territorial conflict, and by human reluctance to abandon the intruding way, may find the baboon the most instructive of species. Among primates
his aggressiveness is second only to man’s. He is a born bully, a born criminal,
a born candidate for the hangman’s noose. As compared with the gorilla—that
gentle, inoffensive, submissive creature for whom a minimum of tyranny yields a
maximum of results—the baboon represents nature’s most lasting challenge to the
police state. He is as submissive as a truck, as inoffensive as a bulldozer, as gentle
as a power-driven lawnmower. He is ugly. He has the yellow-to-amber eyes that
one associates with the riverboat gambles. He has predatory inclinations, and in
certain seasons he enjoys nothing better than killing and devouring the newborn
fawns of the delicate gazelle. And he will steal anything. (Ardrey 1966: 227)

Even if extreme, this statement is representative of the aggressive baboon image in
popular science writing of the time. Lewis Binford, the vehement combatant of
the New Archaeology, made the following sardonic remark in 1972: ‘I am certain
that my days of delivering papers at national meetings, where my behavior has
been compared to that of a male baboon, huffing, puffing, and throwing eyelid
threats in all directions, is not over’ (1972a: 451). Ardrey believed that the baboon, being ‘so unpleasantly reminiscent of man’ (228), could shed light on the
problems of man, and in particular human warfare—academic polemics apparently being one form of it.
A similar ambition to elucidate human nature by looking at other nonhuman primates characterized the work of Ardrey’s British pendant, Desmond Morris. His book
The Naked Ape (1967a) was significantly subtitled ‘a zoologist’s study of the human animal’. Just like Ardrey, he wrote for a broad audience, summarized primate field studies
(though more on chimps), and gave biological explanations for our cultural habits, thus
offering the world a number of easy stories on why women put on lipstick and walk
on high heels. His lengthy, if clinical, descriptions of ‘the naked ape’s’ sexual behaviour
(‘bouts of oral stimulation’ for kissing; ‘skin manipulation’ for caressing) injected a fair
dose of human eroticism in the acceptable format of zoological prose and made the
book a genuine best-seller.24
24 For a virulent critique on this practice, see Zuckerman (1981: 387-97).

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Writing for a more specialized audience, Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox equally
sought to bridge the gap between a cultural and a biological perspective on man.
In a seminal article, published in the very first issue of Man, they called for ‘a marriage of the two disciplines’ of biology and sociology with the former, however,
as the undisputed pater familias: ‘sociological findings, in this perspective, provide data for a more comprehensive, zoological approach’ (Tiger and Fox 1966:
22). With book titles as Men in Groups (Tiger 1969) and The Imperial Animal
(Tiger and Fox 1971), it was inevitable that male-dominated baboons were invoked to supply the necessary primate evidence. Not so much because they were
representative primates but because they ‘have spent a considerable portion of
their evolution outside the forest environment’ (Fox 1968: 51). DeVore had defended baboons as models because they were ground-living; with Tiger and Fox it
was because they were savannah-living (cf. Martin and Voorhies 1975: 135). This
change was due to the increasing number of studies on baboons in different ecological environments. Rowell’s (1966) study of baboons in the forests of Uganda
showed a less male-dominated form of primate society. Kummer’s (1968) study of
hamadryas baboons in very dry, desert-like environments of Ethiopia revealed a
social structure based on one-male, polygamous families. However, these portrayals were dismissed as deviations from the typical pattern of baboons which lived
in the savannah where early hominids had once roamed: ‘Because he [‘man’] is a
gregarious, terrestrial primate with a history of savanna living, it will help us to
look at other terrestrial primates with a similar history’ (Tiger and Fox 1971: 28;
emphasis added; cf. Fox 1968: 52; Tiger 1969: 46). Baboons were now defended
on the basis of their savannah habitat so that the notion of male dominance could
be withheld.
The early sociobiology of Tiger and Fox received ample attention from sociologists,
biologists and anthropologists alike, just like the popularizations by Ardrey and Morris
attracted an enormous lay audience.25 Knowledge of baboons was disseminated to still
wider audiences. For a while, ‘the proper study of mankind’ was not man but baboon.
The aim was explaining the present human condition, not extrapolating towards the
past (Blurton-Jones 1975). Just like rhesus monkeys served as stand-ins for human
physiology, savannah baboons served as simplified mechanisms of human behaviour.
In cities, in politics, in football stadiums and in bed, modern humans acted with a behavioral repertoire that was quintessentially an adaptation to savannah life two million
years ago.
It is not easy to explain the popularity of these grim parallels. ‘Oddly enough,’
a Playboy journalist wrote, ‘we seem to be fascinated by and receptive to this
depressing news about ourselves. [...] Not only have we accepted that we are
the worst of beasts, we enjoy seeing it presumably verified’ (Hunt 1970: 20-1).
Without being able to discuss this to the full, the success of such popular science
must be related to the important changes in popular culture which took place in
the late-1960s, including the rise of occidental misanthropy, the scepticism about
25 The term ‘sociobiology’ is an anachronism in this context but it is generally accepted that the work
of Tiger and Fox, amongst others, paved the way for Wilson’s sociobiological synthesis (1975).

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Western culture and its relentless exploitation of scarce resources, the enthusiasm
for popular science as an alternative form of religion, the emergence of an increasingly secularized generation of young educated people with sufficient spending
power to buy popular-science books and sufficient leisure time to actually read
them, the possibility to read about sexuality as a scientific theme, and the delight
to find a diagnosis of the cultural disease in the biological reality of the human
body. It was also in this context that the !Kung Bushmen were hailed as exemplars
of authentic humanity, relics of a universal lifestyle based on social egalitarianism, balanced economics, and primeval affluence. The baboons explained where
Western culture had gone wrong, the !Kung what it should have been.

More than summaries
With the increase in field studies, fossils and—most importantly—undergraduate
students, textbooks did not only become necessary but also lucrative publications
in the early seventies. It is here that we first encounter the canonical version of
the baboon model as we know it today. Indeed, it is here that we even first encounter the term ‘model’ when talking about the relevance of nonhuman primates
in human evolution research. Baboons did not only shed light on present people
but also on prehistoric people. Birdsell’s introduction to physical anthropology
stated that the baboons, ‘aggressive by nature’, were ‘suitable models for the earliest of ground-living hominids’ (Birdsell 1972: 204). Undergraduates in prehistory
and palaeoanthropology could read in Pfeiffer’s Emergence of Man (1972: 233):
‘Something of the past may be deduced from the behavior of primates currently
at large in grassy savannas—African baboons in particular [who] provide a dramatic example of adaptation to an exposed environment.’ Whereas in Human
Evolution, Campbell (1967: 339) asserted that ‘the hamadryas baboon might suggest a possible model for [Australopithecus’] evolving structure.’ From these three
introductory books, the baboon model favoured by Campbell was the most unusual because of its reliance on hamadryas baboons. These monkeys, which dwell
in the very dry Ethiopian upland, were known through the studies of the Swiss
ethologist Hans Kummer (1968). Campbell assumed that as an adaptation to the
extreme terrestrial conditions in dry open plains, early hominids, like hamadryas
baboons, had developed a structure of one-male units instead of male bonding
(1967: 280). The absence of great sexual dimorphism in Australopithecus would
then be an expression of the reduced male dominance hierarchy. ‘But the analogy
between hamadryas and Australopithecus must not be pressed,’ Campbell (1967:
339) warned, ‘the two genera are very different, and their behavior and society
may be quite distinct.’ Hamadryas or not, the basis for Campbell’s argument was
still an ecological analogy and in this he did not differ from Birdsell and Pfeiffer.
Yet Birdsell and Pfeiffer did not only look at baboon studies, but also at the
first publications on wild chimpanzees as they dripped in from the field stations
where Goodall, the Reynolds and Kortlandt worked. If baboons could tell something about the savannah life of the australopithecines, then chimpanzees, so
they argued, represented the previous stage when man’s ancestors had not yet left
the trees. It is not difficult to see Jane Goodall’s work in the description Pfeiffer

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(1972: 259-60) gives of ‘primates resembling chimpanzees 20 to 25 millions years
ago’ who were ‘lively, easygoing, relatively independent creatures, with social systems sufficiently flexible to allow considerable freedom of movement and individual action. Like present-day chimpanzees, most of these forest dwellers moved
in and out of shadows and along old ancestral trails.’ Baboons, on the other hand,
provided ‘a model of primate life in the grassy savannas of Africa, the sort of
world our ancestors encountered when they moved out of open woodlands’ (250).
Birdsell concurred with this dual vision: chimpanzees provided ‘a model for dryopithecine behavior’ (1972: 210), whereas baboons were ‘suitable models for the
earliest ground-living hominids’ (204). No matter that chimpanzees behaved ‘in
the most human fashion’ (Birdsell 1972: 210), they were favourite models for earlier stages because they lived in a wooded environment. If today it seems hard to
imagine that chimps were once considered to represent an older phase of human
evolution than baboons, it only goes to illustrate the pervasion of the argument
by ecological analogy in the early seventies.
The function of these early models was mostly didactic. After defending the
choice of a particular species, the textbooks continued with a description of the
social life of that living species without making any precise inferences about the
past. Baboons and chimpanzees served in first instance to give a live image of our
most remote ancestors, similar to the Fuegians and Tasmanians in Lubbock’s book
a century earlier.
Textbooks are more than summaries of scientific knowledge; through abstraction, simplification and rewriting of the disciplinary history, they channel previous theories into the next generation and steer debates into particular directions.
Textbooks do not only resume past knowledge but influence future research; rewriting the history of a debate is an integral part of scientific polemic and rhetoric
(Fontijn and Van Reybrouck 1999). The baboon model, in its canonical form, was
more an invention of 1970s introductory books than it was a summary of existing
theories on the baboon. It was only in these textbooks that the savannah analogy
(instead of DeVore’s terrestrial analogy) was fully drawn; it was in textbooks that
the word ‘model’ was first used; it was in textbooks that the observed, ecological
similarity justified the use of analogies drawn from baboons, hamadryas baboons
and chimpanzees. DeVore and Washburn’s baboon model, the contingent, cobbled-together outcrop of their divergent research interests, was now detached from
its originators and had been reified into scientific orthodoxy. By thus promulgating the baboon model, textbooks made it respectable and vulnerable at the same
time. Alternative models would primarily react against this textbook and popularscience version than against the publications of the original investigators.

Why baboons?
Why was the baboon the first primate source of inspiration for students of human
evolution? At its start, serendipity certainly played its part in 1955 when Washburn
happened to stay in the Victoria Falls hotel next to a troop of baboons which were incidentally ‘the tamest in Africa’ (Washburn 1983: 16). Yet it would be hard to attribute
the whole rise and content of the baboon model to this coincidence alone. The relative

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ease with which baboons could be observed also played a role in choosing this animal
for fieldwork. Washburn, who had participated in the Asiatic Primate Expedition as a
graduate student in 1937, knew the difficulties Carpenter had met when observing the
elusive gibbons who swung high in the canopy where foliage was seasonally very dense.
As baboons lived on the ground in open environments, they allowed closer and more
permanent observations to be made. This ease of access resulted in the tremendous expansion of baboon research during the early sixties (cf. figure 16). However, international postwar politics were also involved: the distribution of baboon species from Ethiopia
to South-Africa roughly correlated with the extent of British colonies in East-Africa. If
you were an English zoologist or an American anthropologist during the early sixties
with an interest in primate behaviour, East-Africa would have been the place to go to.
There you found English-speaking colleagues like Louis Leakey or Desmond Clark,
there you had Pan-African congresses, there you had baboons.26
By the mid-sixties, baboons (and their close relatives the macaques) were by far
the best studied nonhuman primate in the world; many scholars (Washburn being
one of them) supposed that their behaviour was exemplary of other primates. This
assumption, erroneous as it proved to be, was understandable since the variability
of primate behaviour was poorly understood. An interest in ecology, and more
precisely in how baboon behaviour was an adaptive response to the environmental
constraints of a terrestrial habitat with exposed landscapes, patchy food and relatively high predator pressure, emerged only with a number of younger scholars,
particularly through the work of DeVore and Hall. From the mid-sixties onwards,
however, baboons were no longer invoked in evolutionary speculations as archetypical monkeys but as terrestrial specialists who had evolved a rigid social hierarchy in response to their demanding habitat. DeVore’s and Hall’s view of baboon
society as an army-like organism with prescribed functions for each subgroup was
influenced by both an observational bias and a theoretical stance. Firstly, observation limits intuitively called for such an interpretation of behaviour in terms of
age groups and sex classes. Thelma Rowell, a British student of forest baboons,
reflects very openly on baboon research, including her own, in the 1960s (in her
foreword to Ransom 1981: 9):
Looking at monkeys in the bush it is relatively easy to distinguish between adult
males and females and between juveniles of different ages. Adult female baboons
especially show easily-read signs of their precise reproductive condition. On the
other hand, it is not easy to learn to recognise individuals, beyond a few battlescarred adult males with absolute certainty. So the early accounts that we wrote
described behavior in terms of the interactions between classes of animals, or between characteristic behaviors of classes of animals, in terms of their age and sex.

26 The role of the Pan-African Congress on Prehistory in giving a sense of community cannot be overestimated: the lists of delegates reads like a Who is Who of all those working on prehistory, geology,
zoology, and anthropology in colonial Africa (Clark and Cole 1957).

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The image of the hierarchically organized baboon society resulted in great part from
what was readily visible in a troop. Secondly, the impact of structural-functionalist anthropology cannot be neglected (Gilmore 1981; Sperling 1991). Malinowski and particularly Radcliffe-Brown had stipulated a systemic view on human society that consisted of neatly arranged components where individuals took on roles that were controlled
by norms and rules. This theoretical framework provided the intellectual background
for much early anthropological primatology. Baboon society was seen as an arrangement
of constituent parts, each with a specific function, where all aspects of social behaviour
were interpreted in terms of function and survival. Washburn repeatedly confessed his
admiration for Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown (1977; 1983; DeVore 1992).27 In an
interview with Donna Haraway (1989: 219), DeVore who was trained as an anthropologist recalls the mission Washburn gave him: ‘My marching orders were very straightforward. “DeVore, you’ve absorbed Murdock, Radcliffe-Brown, and Malinowski. Go
out and tell us what it’s like with the baboons.” ’
If baboons were ever appreciated because they responded to Western notions
of male dominance, aggression and power, it must be in the works by Ardrey,
Tiger and Fox. The obsession with male bonding, territoriality, and power lay at
the base of their publications and baboons revealed the darkest side of humans
during the late sixties. Gartlan (1968) has made the interesting point that the key
notions of aggression and dominance were survivals of prewar studies on captive
monkeys kept in poor conditions where stress was severe and dominance behaviour more frequent. Only a couple of years later, textbooks on human evolution
staged the baboon as a living Australopithecus, on the basis of a savannah parallel.
They often dismissed alternative and less dramatic forms of baboon society because they occurred in forests or deserts.
Sheer contingency, observational access, amount of research, assumed representativeness, ecological analogy, cultural expectation, these were some of the motivations for looking at baboons from an evolutionary perspective. Observational
bias and structural-functionalist anthropology favoured interpretations in terms
of age and sex classes, resulting in the hierarchical, male-dominated, aggressive
view of primate society. Though this image was not intended at the outset, it became scientific orthodoxy for about a decade. Indeed, when Washburn’s eye fell on
the baboons next to his hotel room in Livingstone during the third Pan-African
27 Washburn had come under the influence of Radcliffe-Brown in Chicago (DeVore 1992: 418); he
called Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific one of the three most influential books he read
(Washburn 1983: 6) and saw the work of Yerkes and Carpenter as innovative as Malinowski’s and
Radcliffe-Brown’s had been in anthropology (Washburn 1977: 232). His functional explanations
of primate anatomy and behaviour were to him extrapolations of structural-functionalist anthropology; he even believed that ‘Malinowski’s functional theory probably works more usefully for
monkeys than for human beings’ (Washburn 1983: 17). Yet despite this nominal allegiance to
Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, ‘the notions of function and social system in Washburn’s physical
anthropology owed more to comparative evolutionary biology than to the analyses of either of these
social theorists’ (Haraway 1989: 205). The functionalist impact might have been more nominal
than substantial in Washburn’s case, but this cannot be said about the work of someone like DeVore.
Indeed, the functionalist ideas of Radcliffe-Brown ‘were quite congruent with the then-ascendant
evolutionary view that individual animals acted for the good of their society (and ultimately, for
their species), rather than out of more selfish reasons’ (Gilmore 1981: 391).

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congress, there was no way he could predict that the ten-year old son of the conference co-organizer would forty years later, together with his ghost-writer, express
the most extreme version of the baboon model:
I have always thought it reasonable to imagine early hominid social life as analogous, in some strictly circumscribed ways, to the social life of savannah baboons.
Baboons live in troops, some small, some compromising as many as a hundred
individuals.[...] [Australopithecine] habitat would have been similar: patchy,
open woodland and some gallery forest, offering a range of plant foods: nuts,
fruits, shoots. No doubt they foraged for grubs and birds’ eggs, just as baboons do
today. No doubt, too, they occasionally captured young antelope and the young of
monkeys, just as baboons do today. [...]
In this sketch the principal difference between these hominids’ behavior and what
we see in modern savannah baboons is the hominids’ mode of locomotion: bipedal as against quadrupedal. Everything else is imagined to be similar to any
large primate that forages in relatively open country for a largely vegetarian diet.
(R. Leakey and Lewin 1992: 137-9)

Social carnivores and geladas
What do Ethiopian gelada baboons, Alaskan wolves and Tanzanian hyenas have in
common? Very little, apart from the fact that they all seem rather unlikely candidates as models for human evolution. And yet, this is precisely how they were seen
in the early 1970s after the baboon model had become textbook knowledge and
before the chimpanzee model gained its full momentum. Following an old hint by
Washburn, social carnivores (wolves, hyenas, wild dogs and lions) were thought
to resemble early hominids in their hunting behaviour. This reliance on hunting,
particularly on big game, required the coordination of individual efforts to the extent that it largely dictated the social structure of the species. The causal train ran
from subsistence to society. The few advocates of the gelada model, however, took
one step down by looking at dentitions to deduce diets. Gelada baboons constitute a different genus among the cercopithecines; they live in the rocky Ethiopian
upland, have bright-red triangular skin patches on their breast, shuffle on their
haunches, and live on grasses. In many respects, gelada teeth were like the australopithecine dental features, so that the gelada subsistence base of small-object
feeding might have been similar to what australopithecines ate. Gelada modellers
looked into mouths to learn about menus; carnivore modellers looked at menus
to learn about mores.
Despite this difference in theme, both relied on a rather distant source to predict hypotheses on early hominids. None of them denied the many differences
between source and subject, yet they believed that some structural similarities
might be more relevant than multiple formal resemblances. The purpose was not
so much a wholesale projection of living animals to fossil bones, but a selective
transfer of attributes from one side of the analogy to the other. The discussions
surrounding these models were thus far more technical than anything hitherto encountered (this is especially true of the gelada model)—which explains why they

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never were really popular. Another reason is that many of the substantive claims
eventually turned out to be simply wrong (this is especially true of the carnivore
model with its undue reliance on hunting). No matter the many semantic weaknesses, in a syntactic sense they provided the most valid forms of analogy. Not
surprisingly, some preferred the term analogy instead of model. Jolly (1970) and
Dunbar (1976), who looked at geladas, spoke of their ‘baboon analogy’; King
(1976) referred to the ‘carnivore analogy’.

From subsistence to society: the social carnivore analogy 28
From Hobbes’ ‘homo homini lupus’ to Spengler’s ‘Der Mensch ist ein Raubtier’, Western
thought has often tried to elucidate human nature by reference to carnivores, a mental
exercise commonly founded in misanthropy. The presence of wolves and lions in fairy
tales and fables equally testifies to this extra-scientific fascination with predators—just
think of Romulus and Remus, Little Red Cap, King Noble, Werewolves and the Lion
King (Lopez 1978). It was only in the late 1960s that the importance of these animals
for evolutionary purposes started to be explored.29

Man the diurnal hunter
‘The relevance of carnivore behavior to the study of early hominids’ was the title
of a paper which appeared in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology in 1969.
Its authors, George Schaller and Gordon Lowther, urged to look more closely at
carnivores as these offered ‘numerous possibilities towards the elucidation of the
origins and form of social organization in man’ (336). To start looking at carnivores was a brave change of plans for someone like Schaller who had spent years
observing gorillas (Schaller 1964) and who was the world authority on them before Dian Fossey began her fieldwork. The 1960s increase in field studies, however, had laid bare the enormous variability of primate behaviour (even within the
same species), so that every attempt at defining a prototypical primate pattern was
rapidly frustrated. Following the ecological paradigm, Schaller and Lowther saw
modern primate behaviour as a function of its environment, not as an ancestral
relic. ‘Since social systems are strongly influenced by ecological conditions,’ they
wrote (1969: 307), ‘it seemed that it might be more productive to compare hominids with animals which are ecologically but not necessarily phylogenetically
similar, such as the social carnivores.’ Ecological similarity did not just refer to a
similar environment (otherwise baboons would have still been appropriate) but to
a similar way of exploiting that environment, that is by hunting. Ecological analogy meant here ‘subsistence analogy’. For Washburn and DeVore, early hominids,
like baboons, had had to defend themselves against predators; for Schaller and
Lowther, early hominids were the predators. Some of the difference in emphasis
28 Strictly speaking, these are of course not primate models but since they made a considerable impact
on the field of palaeoanthropology and primatology, they need to be taken into account.
29 An early example is Carveth Read’s vision of our ancestors as wolf-apes, ‘Lycopithecus’, ‘who cooperated in hunting’ and lived in ‘a society entirely different from that of any of the Primates [...]
and most like that of the dogs and wolves—a hunting pack’ (1920: 39; cf. Cartmill 1993).

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can be felt in the choice of words. DeVore and Washburn (1963: 335) spoke of
‘the problems which confronted early man’, whereas Schaller and Lowther (1969:
336) investigated, more optimistically, ‘the broad spectrum of behavioural possibilities that were open to early hominids’.
The substantial part of their paper, however, did not greatly differ from the
previous work on baboons in that it was equally rather descriptive than argumentative. Schaller and Lowther summarized field studies on lions, leopard, cheetahs,
spotted hyenas, wild dogs and jackals with regard to group dynamics, dominance,
leadership, territoriality, and so on, while also integrating evidence from primate
studies and hunter-gatherer ethnography. If a trait, like male dominance, was
found in all three classes (humans, primates, carnivores), it was directly attributed
to the early hominids as well. If a trait was confined to the carnivores alone, it
could still be projected into the past. This was the case for inter-specific aggression, cooperation and food-sharing. The basis for these inferences was, of course,
hunting. In logical terms: if hunting was the observed similarity between carnivores and early hominids, cooperation, food-sharing and aggression were predicted similarities for the target analogue.
But was hunting really an observed similarity? Of course it was not, at least not
on the target side of the analogy. No one had seen an australopithecine making
a kill, yet the hunting early hominid had become an icon of palaeoanthropology
ever since Dart’s misanthropic visions, Leakey’s spectacular discoveries, Isaac’s early analyses and, of course, the Man the Hunter conference in Chicago, 1966. As
mentioned above, the resulting book of that conference (Lee and DeVore 1968)
presented not so much the inauguration as the epitome of the hunting hypothesis.
It asserted that humans had been hunting for over one million years (99% of the
human career) and that hunting was ‘the master behavior pattern’ (Laughlin 1968:
304) responsible for all major changes in human evolution. However, the hunting hypothesis rested on rather shaky empirical foundations, its iconic exemplars
from the present world being the overwhelmingly herbivorous baboons and the
predominantly vegetarian Bushmen. Primates could simply no longer do. The carnivore model, not the baboon model, was a direct reflection of this conviction.
Schaller and Lowther attempted to demonstrate the viability of hominid hunting by some small experiments in the Serengeti. They consisted of hiking and
seeing how much meat could be collected by either picking up young, crouching
animals (like Thomson’s gazelle fawns), scavenging, or by chasing sick, old or isolated animals. The following quote gives an impression of the charming enthusiasm of these pioneer days:
In the course of our wandering we also came across a sick, abandoned zebra foal,
weighing about 40 kg. We captured it after a brief chase (and then released it).
A young giraffe, weighing some 150 kg., behaved abnormally; after stalking to
within a few meters from it, we found that it was blind. One of us grabbed its
tail to simulate capture. (328)

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Zebra foals, blind giraffes, and tail-grabbing, Schaller and Lowther concluded that
‘under similar circumstances a carnivorous hominid group could have survived’
(328).
There was, however, one noticeable difference with carnivore hunting: hominids were believed to hunt during daytime, carnivores at night. What happens
here is something curious in the logic of analogy: whereas dissimilarities are often
believed to weaken the argument, this one reinforced it. Because by being nocturnal predators, the social carnivores left an ecological opening for a social predator
hunting large animals during the day. Nocturnal and diurnal hunting habits were
complementary rather than conflicting. As said previously, a certain distance between the source and subject analogue is often more productive than at first sight
seems. It was this lack of fear for a distant analogue which had led Schaller and
Lowther to look at social carnivores in the first place.

Strengthening a distant analogy
In the wake of Schaller and Lowther a number of authors further explored the
possibilities of a carnivore analogy (Cachel 1975; King 1975; 1976; 1980; Peters
and Mech 1975; Peters 1978; Thompson 1975; 1976; Hall and Sharp 1978).
They all agreed that phylogenetic closeness was not determinant: ‘While it is true
that African apes are the closest living relatives of man,’ Susan Cachel (1975:194)
wrote, ‘this does not necessarily make them the logical choice for an evolutionary
model.’ Hall and Sharp (1978: 3) coined the aphorism that ‘anatomy follows behavior’, not vice versa. Studying behavioural correlates (social hunters) was therefore more important than looking at phylogenetic and anatomical neighbours.
Rather than discussing all proposals separately, I prefer to focus on how they defended the choice of their (more distant) source. Which criteria did they invoke
to strengthen their analogies based on carnivores?
A first and simple answer was that including carnivores in the analogy enlarged
the number and variety of source contexts used. This was Glenn King’s strategy
(King 1975; 1976; 1980; cf. Peters and Mech 1975). Not confining himself to
studying either nonhuman primates or hunter-gatherers or social carnivores, he
tried ‘to coordinate these rich sources of inference about early hominid behavior’
(King 1980: 107). Thus in his studies on socioterritorial units, he found that a fission-fusion system (large stable groups which divide into smaller subgroups) was
not restricted to carnivores only but could also be seen in some nonhuman primate
species who occasionally practised hunting (like chimpanzees) and among huntergatherers. The three lines of evidence were ‘in complete harmony’ (King 1976:
330). He saw it as a form of convergent evolution, an adaptation to hunting, and
postulated a similar social structure for early hominids. Carnivores strengthened
the analogy because they enlarged the source sample. Since he worked on species
as diverse as hyena, wolf and lion, the variety of the source was also increased.
Others, however, believed that carnivore data was not just complementary but
far superior to observations on primates. According to Thompson (1975: 113)
there was ‘uncontrovertible evidence of the convergence of human behavior with
carnivore behavior’. This was defended by summoning the number of similarities

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between the two sides of the analogy, a second criterion. In their book on wolves
(with the promising title Wolf and Man: Evolution in Parallel), the editors called
the similarities between both wolves and humans ‘impressive’ (Hall and Scharp
1978: 2):
Both are social animals whose living units are relatively small numerically. Both
are intelligent, clearly more intelligent than the prey on which they subsist. Both
are capable of extreme physical exertion and, more important, of sustained physical exertion at a relatively high level. Both exploit open ground and broken forest
areas. Neither species has any single physical attribute that allows it either to
overpower or to outrun large prey at will. The two species are about the same body
weight and, though not among the largest animals in the world, are virtually
immune from predation.

Some of these similarities are obviously more important than the others. That
wolves and humans are about the same body weight is not relevant (and, in fact,
not even true). There were as many differences as similarities. Washburn, sticking
to his primate models (and thus keeping silent about his early hints at a carnivore
model), did not hesitate to stress the immense differences between carnivores and
humans. The carnivore analogy, he wrote together with Moore, ‘completely misses
the special nature of the human adaptation’ (Washburn and Moore 1974: 135):
Human females do not go out to hunt and then regurgitate to their young when
they return. Human young do not stay in dens, but are carried by their mothers.
Male wolves do not kill with tools, butcher, and share with females who have been
gathering. A human mother who hunted like a wolf or wild dog would have to
run a two-minute mile carrying a baby.

King (1980: 101) quoted these lines and replied to them:
These statements are correct, but they do not constitute a general argument. While
there are certainly differences between humans and carnivores, there are also differences between human and nonhuman primates, which Washburn and Moore
advocate as a source of inferences about early hominids. [...] Male chimpanzees
do not kill and butcher with tools, nor do they exchange meat for plant foods
gathered by females. [...] The fact that one carries the meat in his hands and the
other in his stomach should not obscure the socioecological analogy.

Washburn and Moore indicated dissimilarities between humans and wolves, King
replied by showing dissimilarities between humans and chimps. What is really at
stake in this amusing tug-of-war is the logical question as to what counts as relevant similarity (and dissimilarity) and what not. More than anything else, this
debate shows that (dis)similarities can never be discussed per se. They gain their
meaning only insofar they are relevant, i.e. causally connected to what we want to
infer. This brings us to our third strengthening device.

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Many of the carnivore advocates attempted to indicate a causal connection
between different aspects of the source analogue. King, for example, argued that
among carnivores the existence of a flexible social system of large, stable groups
with fluid subgroups was caused by ‘the selective pressures connected with the
advent of hunting’ (King 1976: 329), implying that if hunting was present with
early hominids, a similar social system would have arisen. Peters (1978) showed
that big-game hunting over large areas among wolves required the existence of
cognitive maps and communication, thus suggesting that early hominids had similar devices (he even guessed that cognitive maps might have been at the base of
human language). The most original argument, however, comes from a paper by
Thompson (1976). Written in a rather abstruse style, it can be summarized as
follows:
1. Gracile australopithecines, following Dart’s study of the Makapansgat site,
exhibit ‘the behaviors of high intraspecific killing, cannibalism, and attacking
larger carnivores’ (Thompson 1976: 554).
2. Of all living carnivores and nonhuman primates, only three species show the
same set of behavioural patterns: the wolf (Canis lupes), the hyena (Crocuta
crocuta) and the lion (Panthera leo).
3. These three species share another number of behaviours, which do not occur
together in any other carnivore or nonhuman primate species: territoriality,
multi-male groups, carnivorous diet (over 50 % meat).
4. Causal relations between these two sets exist. For example: since high intraspecific killing is only possible in species where enough males are around to
ensure group survival after some of its members have been killed, intraspecific
killing is causally related to multi-male groups. Correlations for the other aspects can also be found.
5. Therefore, gracile austalopithecines ‘probably had a diet comparable to the
modern carnivores and lived in resident, multi-male groups’ (Thompson
1976: 554).
The interesting thing about this argument is not so much its conclusion but its
form: it is a classic analogy which moves from an observed similarity (step 1 and
2) to a predicted similarity by a transfer of attributes present in the source (step
3) to the target (step 5), following some causal connections in the source (step
4)—or ‘behavioral correlations in living species’ as Thompson (1976: 552) called
them. The weakness of the argument lays, undoubtedly, in its first premise. Dart’s
ideas were highly controversial and it is unforgivable that Thompson, writing in
the mid-70s, still relied on Dart’s work from the 1940s and 50s while so much
other studies had been done in the meantime. (Another weakness is that his causal
connections are not always as neat as the one above; his explanation of cannibalism, for example, is rather contrived.)
Enhancing the number and variety of source contexts, adding similarities and
establishing causal links within the source were all strategies used by those who
preferred a carnivore analogy over a primate model. Hall and Sharp (1978: 4)
were very clear about it: ‘Though the great apes [...] are relatives of man, they
are relatives who have adapted in a different direction.’ Through the reliance on

Hunting under fire
Hunting was the pivotal point around which the whole carnivore analogy turned.
As long as the conference conclusions of Man the Hunter, Isaac’s interpretation of
living floors or even Dart’s hunting hypothesis were sustained, carnivores could be
successfully invoked. Some authors even started their articles by explicitly assuming (and accepting) the importance of hunting: ‘This view assumes that hunting
was an important part of hominid ecology’, Peters (1978: 95) wrote, while King
(1975: 69) required ‘the assumption that hunting was a major factor in human
evolution’ (King 1975: 69). As a consequence, the observed similarity between
source and target analogue could never be more than an assumed similarity: hunting was not a material, Binfordian static that could be observed in the archaeological record but an interpretation of that record.
The ease with which hunting was accepted came under fire by the late 1970s
(cf. Harding and Teleki 1981). Attacks came from different angles, including
primatology (Teleki 1975), feminist anthropology (Tanner and Zihlman 1976;
Zihlman 1978; Tanner 1981), hunter-gatherer ethnography (Hayden 1981)
and taphonomic archaeology (Brain 1981; Isaac 1984; Binford 1981; 1988a).
Primatologists indicated the amount of hunting among nonhuman primate species, ethnographers documented the importance of foraging among hunter-gatherers, feminists decried the androcentric bias of Man the Hunter, and archaeologists criticized the speculative reasoning and the poorly understood archaeological
record.
Around 1980 it became clear that early hominid hunting was a much more
contentious issue than had been previously estimated. This doubt sealed the fate
of the popularity of social carnivore analogies. In 1978, Hall and Sharp published
their book on ‘the wolf as a model for human evolution’ (6) believing they were on
the threshold of a new research programme ‘comparable to the primate literature
at the time DeVore and Washburn (1961) articulated their dominance model of
baboon social organization’ (207). In fact, they were at the end of what had always
been a fairly minor stream of thought compared to the baboon and chimp business. Perhaps this explains why their book is so very rarely quoted. It turned into
oblivion, and got lost on the bookshelves of natural history museums rather than
of anthropology departments where it was destined for.

From dentition to diet: the gelada analogy
Was hunting the basic assumption of the social carnivore analogy, proponents of
a gelada model were far less assertive when it came to establishing the nature of
early hominid food resources. In fact, for them diet was not the premise but the
very problem. Although I found only three articles explicitly dealing with such

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analogy (Jolly 1970; Szalay 1975; Dunbar 1976) and even if their popularity was
rather limited, they are worth looking at in some detail as they all present interesting forms of reasoning.

The seed-eaters
The first and most influential proposal was Clifford Jolly’s 1970 article in Man, entitled
‘The seed-eaters: a new model of hominid differentiation based on a baboon analogy’
(1970).30 Even if the ultimate aim of the paper was to come to ‘a convincing causal
model of hominid origins’, large part of it was dedicated to a discussion of an analogy
based on Theropithecus, the genus of which the gelada is the only living species today
(Jablonski 1993). Jolly took issue with the accepted orthodoxy that tool use was the first
major step in human evolution, intensely correlated with upright bipedalism and canine
reduction (Washburn and Avis 1958; Washburn and DeVore 1961).31 Discontent with
such ‘artefactual determinism’ (6), he argued that if toolmaking was of any importance
in changing hominid teeth, signs of it should ‘appear in the fossil record at least as early
as the first signs of dental reduction, rather than twelve million years later’ (7). He equally questioned ‘the current obsession with hunting and carnivorousness’ (8-9) which was
undoubtedly corroborated by observations of chimpanzee hunting. But if chimpanzees
hunt and if hunting is a truly important evolutionary factor, why then did chimpanzees
not evolve into humans? Jolly rightly said that ‘it is illogical to invoke the behaviour of
living apes to explain the origin of something that they themselves have not developed’
(9). This fundamental critique could be brought up against most of the chimpanzee
models, as the next section will show.
If tool use and hunting could no longer explain the earliest phase of human
evolution in general, and the remarkable canine reduction in particular, what else
could? Seed-eating, Jolly answered. Rather than devouring meat, grinding cereals was what made us human. Seed-eating was consistent with a life in an opencountry habitat, with the general, postcranial anatomy of ‘basal hominids’ (Jolly’s
term) and with the particulars of hominid dentition. He arrived at this original
conclusion through an analogy with the genus Theropithecus.
The choice of Jolly’s source was not prompted by some immediate resemblances with living great apes. Instead, he wrote: ‘We must look outside the normal
behaviour of apes for a factor which agrees functionally with the known attributes
of early hominids’ (9, original italics). In this sense, hominids were as much outsiders as Theropithecus:

30 The term baboon analogy might cause some confusion. Jolly does not side himself with the traditional baboon models but uses the term baboon sensu latu: apart from Papio, it also includes the
genus Mandrillus and Theropithecus to which the gelada (Theropithecus gelada) belongs.
31 Wiktor Stoczkowski (1994: 96-106) has convincingly demonstrated the tenacity of simplistic causal
explanations of the sort: bipedalism implies free hands, free hands imply tool-use, tool-use implies
canine reduction, etc. This line of reasoning states that tools replaced teeth both in food acquisition
and preparation as well as in defence. With a wink to Leslie White, it can be said that choppers were
‘man’s extrasomatic teeth’.

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many of the characters distinctive of basal hominids, as opposed to pongids, also
distinguish the grassland baboon Theropithecus from its woodland-savannah and
forest relatives Papio and Mandrillus, and are functionally correlated with different, but no less vegetarian, dietary habits. (9)

Both hominids and Theropithecus had deviated from their ancestral stock by moving
into open grasslands. But there were further similarities. Jolly listed the adaptive characters distinguishing hominids from pongids and the genus Theropithecus from Papio and
Mandrillus. He found that the postcranial, cranial and dental adaptations of both hominids and Theropithecus showed several convergences: both had flexible hands attuned to
a precision grip; both had well-developed mastoid processes, correlated to bipedalism or
truncal erectness (modern geladas mainly sit on their buttocks while feeding, requiring
strong muscles to keep their heads upright)32; both had their temporal muscles adapted
to heavy chewing in the molar region of the mouth rather than tearing, stripping, and
nibbling in the incisal region. Most importantly, both had narrower and smaller incisors and bigger molars compared to their woodland and forest relatives. So far for the
observed similarities (Jolly lists some more, but these are the essential ones), what about
the causal relations in the source?
Jolly noted that Theropithecus ‘eats small food objects requiring little incisal preparation, but prolonged chewing’, while Papio ‘concentrates on fleshy fruits and other tree products, most of which require peeling or nibbling with the incisors’ (14).
Theropithecine anatomy was by and large an adaptation to this form of small-object
feeding: the versatile hands were necessary for collecting food-items like grass-blades,
seeds and rhizomes; truncal erectness (sitting upright) allowed rapid gathering with
two hands of small food-objects; greater muscular power in the molar region enabled
heavy chewing of harder and more fibrous food items; big molars enlarged the grinding
surfaces; small incisors permitted better molar occlusion required for grinding. Canine
reduction, in this view, was not an independent process but ‘a secondary effect of dietary
influences on incisors and molars’ (16): the canines became smaller because their neighbouring incisors had become smaller.33
As a consequence of the observed similarities between geladas and hominids
and the causal connection in the source, a further similarity could be predicted.
Jolly stated that there was good reason for ‘attributing the Theropithecus-like incisal proportions and jaw characters of the early hominids to a similar adaptation
to a diet of small, tough objects’ (14). If Theropithecus was a small-object feeder,
so were early hominids. Here was a case of ‘evolutionary parallelism’ (12).
Yet there were also a number of differences between the source and target
analogues. Jolly acknowledged that most parts of the hominid postcranial skeleton, with its adaptation to upright bipedalism, were distinct from Theropithecus,
32 As a consequence of an upright trunk, Jolly argues, epigamic features of both hominids and
Theropithecus changed. The cape of fur on the shoulders of adult male geladas and human facial hair
would be instances of parallel evolution. Idem for the ventral and pectoral position of the female
epigamic features in both taxa.
33 This might be true, but Jolly somehow obliterates the fact that extant geladas still have the longest
canines among primates (Fedigan 1982: 316).

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though this did not affect the analogy (as it was not causally linked to diet).
Other differences were more relevant and thus required more attention. For example, Theropithecus molars showed considerable crown complexity resulting in a
‘bumpy’ surface (a phenomenon known as hypsodonty, which is frequent among
grass-eaters like kangaroos); hominids, instead, had more even cusps with thick
enamel wearing to flat surfaces. On top of that, the anatomy of the hominid
jaw also allowed rotary chewing rather than mere mincing as with Theropithecus.
And the parabolic shape of the hominid dental arcade differed from the V-shaped
theropithecine mandible. All these differences led Jolly to assume that hominids
had had a slightly different diet. Whereas Theropithecus is a specialized grass-eater,
hominids must have subsisted on ‘small, hard, solid objects of more or less spherical shape’ (17). Seeds were the only staple food which fit that description. Rotary
chewing and flat molar surfaces enhanced the breakage of these seeds, whereas a
parabolic dentition gave more space to the tongue in mastication. As such, the observed differences could be accounted for by a slightly different subsistence base.
Instead of grass, Jolly concluded that ‘the diet of basal hominids was probably
centred upon cereal grains’ (18).
From this finding, he went on to erect a two-staged model of human evolution
consisting of a seed-eating phase followed by a later phase in which meat took on
a greater role. Robust australopithecines, in this view, would have remained in
the first phase—an idea in line with the nickname the Leakeys had given to the
type fossil of Australopithecus boisei: ‘nut-cracking man’. Between a reliance on
fruit among our dryopithecine ancestors and our reliance on meat as full-fledged
members of Homo, Jolly inserted several million years of ‘muesli-eating’ in the
australopithecine phase. The earliest step in human evolution did not involve a
transition to meat-eating but ‘a shift from one kind of vegetarianism to another’
(Jolly 1972: 9).
If I have dwelt rather long on Clifford Jolly’s argument, it is because he presents
us with a fascinating example of analogical reasoning based on observing similarity, establishing causality, and accounting for differences. Yet it is precisely on his
appreciation of difference that two later critics would aim their arrows.

Meat, fruit and roots
A dental expert, Frederick Szalay (1975) replied to Jolly’s paper in the same journal
Man. Cast in a rather technical and offensive prose, he argued that while Jolly was
right in deducing a graminivorous diet from the dentition of Theropithecus, the
extrapolation of this inference to the hominid realm was far less certain. Firstly,
because Jolly’s characterization of the hominid complex showed a bias towards the
more robust australopithecines; secondly, because even if teeth of both taxa probably presented similar evolutionary tendencies (smaller incisors, larger molars),
the actual form of these teeth remained too distinct to be lumped: the gelada’s
hypsodonty was quite unlike the even, enamel-covered molars seen in hominids.
There was a ‘lack of parallel between the baboon-protogelada and the pongid-protohominid transitions’:

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Indeed, divergent morphologies and functions characterise the two morphotype
dentitions. The conclusion is inescapable, therefore, that the biological roles performed by the divergent morphologies and mechanical functions were equally
dissimilar. (425)

Human canines had not been reduced simply as a corollary of smaller incisors;
rather, their smaller size had been positively selected for. Canine reduction was
not about the loss of size but about the gain of an alternative character state. The
advantage of smaller canines is that they can be aligned with the incisors, resulting in a sharp ‘edge-to-edge bite’ (Szalay 1975: 428): ‘Strong vertically implanted
incisors plus incisiform canines become the tools which grasp and tear meat, tendon, and fascia’ (428). So, we are back to meat-eating. The molars with their thick
enamel and even surfaces were ‘a great selective premium for either withstanding
the abrasive effects of cracking ribs, metapodials, joints, or for increased longevity, or for both’ (428)—actions for which the delicate, gelada-like cusp pattern
would have been inappropriate. Not surprisingly, Szalay concluded by reiterating
the hunter-scavenger model.
On the basis of the same incisors, canines and molars, Szalay came up with
an entirely different conclusion, independent from a particular living primate. To
him, the differences between Theropithecus and hominid teeth were simply too
large. There had not been any observed similarity to start with.
To complicate matters further, Robin Dunbar (1976) came up with yet another
vision. Although he believed that there still was a genuine observed similarity between
both types of dentition, he wondered whether the causal pattern suggested by Jolly was
the only possible one. Unlike Szalay, Dunbar was not a dental expert but had studied
gelada behaviour in the wild. He found that geladas were very specialized graminivores
who fed on different parts of the grasses throughout the annual cycle (leaves in the wet
season, roots in the dry season, and seeds in between). As all these required heavy chewing, gelada dentition was indeed highly adapted to grinding. So were hominid teeth, but
through different means: in order to obtain efficient occlusion of the molars necessary
for chewing, hominids had lowered the canines (canine reduction), whereas the gelada
had raised the molars (by hypsodonty).34 The effect was still the same. Dunbar, unlike Szalay, believed that ‘the differences in dental morphology between Australopithecus
and Theropithecus need not [...] necessarily reflect marked differences in diet’. To him,
this difference in molar pattern was not relevant and the observed similarity remained
untouched.
Dunbar’s doubts were of another sort. Whereas seed-eating might have been
responsible for the sort of dentition typical of early hominids, a diet based on
fruits and roots could equally cause a similar pattern:
In either case, the dental adaptations would have been similar. Not only do roots
and tubers require considerable mastication prior to ingestion, but most of the
fruits to be found in savanna habitats are of the small, “hard” type with little or
not soft outer parts, and would lead to heavy wear on the cheek teeth. (165)
34 Following an old line of argument, Dunbar argued that hominid tool use permitted the loss of large
canines (cf. note 34).

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So, Dunbar wondered, was a cereal subsistence or the ‘fruit-and-root’ diet responsible for the hominid teeth pattern? If cereals, hominids—like the geladas
Dunbar observed—could have relied year-round on this single resource. But since
we know that hunting did evolve in human evolution, and since animal matter
did play a certain role in australopithecine diet (a notion Dunbar borrows, rather
uncritically, from Wolpoff ), it cannot have been the permanently available cereals. The fruit-and-root diet, on the other hand, ‘would have imposed conditions
of periodic fruit shortage’ which ‘promoted meat-eating as a supplement to a
seasonally deficient diet’ (165). Early hominids, following this line of reasoning,
must have been small-object feeders, but more on hard fruits and roots than on
cereals .
The problem Dunbar’s paper highlights is that of ‘equifinality’, namely that
the same effect (in this case dentition) can be caused by different processes (here:
two different sorts of diets). He presented an argument to select one of the two
processes, but it rested on the rather uncritical assumption that meat was indeed
part of the hominid diet.
Both Szalay and Dunbar offered a critique on the original gelada analogy, but
they did so from diametrically opposed angles which can be summarized as follows: Szalay’s doubts were on the ‘horizontal’ relation of similarity (are both dentitions really similar?); Dunbar’s doubts on the ‘vertical’ relation of causality (is
seed-eating the only cause for the observed dentition?). The resulting conclusions
were totally at odds. Whereas for Jolly, early hominids had been eating seeds, for
Szalay, their diet had consisted of meat, and for Dunbar, it had consisted of fruits
and roots, with a seasonal bit of meat. Deducing diet from dentitions is apparently
no easy business, if even experts differ so strongly. For outsiders of this fairly technical discussion, it is sometimes hard to discern which arguments point to genuine
evolutionary processes and which are just ad hoc solutions (Fedigan 1982: 314-7).
Perhaps the technicality of the subject matter and the resulting indecision explain
why the gelada analogy was never further pursued, despite its logical consistency.
Indeed, it requires quite some devotion to skim through phrases like ‘the short
basi-occiput, and anterio-posteriorly narrowed articular fossa’ without getting a
conclusive answer! Of the 19 contributions to a recently edited volume on the
genus Theropithecus (Jablonski 1993; which is perhaps the best synthesis available
on any primate genus), not one staged geladas as a model for early hominids.

Remote sources and logical consistency
In a formal respect, the arguments based on social carnivores and geladas were all
cases of valid (or rational) analogies, irrespective of their resulting claims. Formal
validity, of course, does not guarantee the truth (or plausibility) of the conclusion—since this is equally dependent on the truth of the premises—but it is at
least a necessary prerequisite of the analogy.
It cannot be accidental that in the history of postwar models, the greatest logical consistency was achieved with the most remote source analogues. Not seduced
by the richness of immediate, but often irrelevant, similarities stemming from
our closest living relatives, carnivore and gelada modellers sought to find genuine

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resemblances and causal connections. Their models were examples of ‘imported’
instead of ‘manifest analogies’ (Leatherdale 1974). Rather than finding an all-embracing life image of our ancestral past, the gelada analogy served to solve a localized problem—without pretending that early hominids were ‘really like’ them.
Similarly, social carnivores were never said to be living australopithecines; in some
respects they simply showed a number of convergent adaptations.
Their logical qualities notwithstanding, the carnivore and gelada analogies
never made it into widely disseminated, regurgitated and popularized textbook
knowledge. For this, the source analogues were perhaps too distant, the intrinsic
qualities for imaginative reconstruction too limited, the discussions too technical (in case of the gelada) and its premises, especially hunting in the carnivore
model, too much accepted at face-value. The multifarious attack against the hunting hypothesis in the late 1970s—in particular the taphonomic study of the PlioPleistocene record, the reassessment of ethnographic and primatological evidence
concerning meat-eating, and the feminist-anthropological critique—undermined
the credibility of any model built on social carnivores. Ten years after the glorious
vocabulary of Man the Hunter, early hominids were believed to be displaying a
range of activities, but chasing mammals was less and less one of them. By 1980,
the idea that hunting had been the very driving force behind human evolution was
soon regarded as one of the sweeping fantasies of the 1960s.
In theory, Jolly’s seed-eating hypothesis could provide a plausible and wellfounded alternative now that meat-eating had fallen into disgrace. Yet this never
really happened: it just remained ‘Jolly’s seed-eating hypothesis’ as it continued to
be referred to even after ten years (Fedigan 1982: 314-7). It was perhaps gratifying for the author that his name kept being mentioned in later renditions of the
idea which is still around, but it was detrimental to the idea itself. In a sense, the
success of a theory can be read off of the degree of detachment from its original
designer. Due to textbook transformations and popular science writing in the
early seventies, the baboon model had become disconnected from its originators
Washburn and DeVore; it was turned into what one could call ‘public knowledge’.
Ironically, the highest praise an author can receive for an idea is that his or her
name be forgotten and disconnected from it. Only disconnected ideas live a life
of their own. Jolly’s seed-eating hypothesis never reached that stage. At the time
hunting became discredited, a more powerful alternative than the grass-nibbling
gelada—a species few people had heard of anyway—started to fire the minds of
anthropologists: the chimpanzee. And although the earliest claim for a chimpanzee
model drew upon Jolly’s work, in all later formulations the geladas were dropped
out of it. They returned to what they had always been to most anthropologists: a
zoological curio dwelling in the Ethiopian upland, where they shuffled on their
buttocks, picked up grasses, and displayed their bright pectoral patches—not the
sort of stuff human ancestors were made of.
Wolves, hyenas, lions, geladas—during the first half of the 1970s, their behaviour or diet was interpreted in terms of convergence to the hominids, rather than
divergence from them (as with the apes). Analogy was at stake here rather than homology, to use the terms in their traditional biological meaning. The purpose was

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not projective modelling, but analogical reasoning. Or to re-use the twin concepts
of which the Victorian social evolutionists were so fond of, we are dealing here
with cases of ‘independent invention’ rather than ‘historical connexion’.
The chimpanzee model was a different story altogether.

Chimpanzees
It is hard to imagine a primate species which has made a larger impact on human evolution studies than the common chimpanzee. Once an elusive animal in the wild (cf.
Nissen 1931), from the 1960s onwards the results of fieldwork on the chimpanzee
have not ceased to surprise scientists and non-scientists. Starting with small scale research projects by the British (Goodall at Gombe) and the Japanese (Itani at Mahale)
in Tanzania, studies of chimpanzee behaviour have expanded tremendously during the
following decades, making it the best studied great ape to date (Hebert and Courtois
1994; figure 17).35 Time and again, chimps seemed to be much more human than was
previously thought possible: they used tools, they made tools, they shared food, they
showed occasional bipedalism, they hunted, they hunted cooperatively, and so on. This
behavioural similarity, coupled with a genetic affinity, made chimps interesting creatures
for modelling human evolution.
However, it is nearly forgotten that originally chimpanzees were studied as
ecological analogues, not phylogenetic homologues. Louis Leakey did not simply want Goodall to study these animals as such, but in particular to study them
in the Gombe region—a reserve whose open woodland vegetation bordering on
a lake shore, he believed, was comparable to the environment of the hominid
sites he had excavated. His instrumental role in awakening a palaeoanthropological interest in chimpanzees had to do with an assumed ecological analogy,
not so much behavioural similarity. The rationale for studying chimps eventually
changed (Goodall 1986). The popular image of Gombe increasingly became one
of a dense, impenetrable forest, and the occasional activities of the chimps on the
beach of Lake Tanganyika received less attention from scientists and popular-science writers, although this was the place where Goodall and her family actually
lived (1990: 22-3). This changing representation of the Gombe environment was
paralleled by a changing appreciation of chimpanzees’ role as models. Just like
baboons had originally been studied because of their observability, and were eventually favoured because of ecological similarity, chimpanzees were initially studied
because of ecological analogy, and were only later defended on the basis of phylogenetic homology and behavioural similarity.
However, at the base of the fully developed chimpanzee model laid not so
much a fascination with chimps but a frustration with anthropologists, male anthropologists. More than Goodall and her colleagues, the chimp model was forged
by a number of North-American feminist anthropologists.

35 At the same Jane Goodall drew world-wide attention with her work, the Reynolds and Kortlandt were
equally observing chimpanzees in the wild.

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Figure 17. Chimpanzees are by far the best studied great ape in primatology. This graph was
compiled on the basis of a bibliometric research and shows the relative percent of articles for
each great ape species in five time periods (Hebert and Courtois 1994: figure 1)

The feminist critique
As early as 1971, Sally Linton published an article entitled ‘Woman the Gatherer:
male bias in anthropology’. In it, she expressed her severe dissatisfaction with
theories of human evolution such as put forward by Washburn and Lancaster
(1968) in the Man the Hunter volume because they showed ‘a strong male bias in
the questions asked, and the interpretations given’ (Linton 1971: 37):
So, while the males were out hunting, developing all their skills, learning to cooperate, inventing language, inventing art, creating tools and weapons, the poor dependent females were sitting back at the home base having one child after another
(many of them dying in the process), and waiting for the males to bring home the
bacon. While this reconstruction is certainly ingenious, it gives one the decided
impression that only half the species—the male half—did any evolving. (42)

From this criticism, she developed an alternative interpretation in which food
sharing, the origin of family, tool use, more complex social organization, complex
communication and increased brain size were not the result of male hunting but
of female gathering and maternal care for the young. To her, the mother-infant
bond formed the base of the family, particularly since the period of infant dependency had lengthened due to increased immaturity at birth. Sharing started with
mothers providing food for their long-dependent offspring. A sling for carrying

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infants and a container for carrying fruits were the first tools instead of weapons. This was in a nutshell the whole theory which later feminist anthropologists
would expand. Interestingly, chimpanzees were not mentioned in Linton’s paper,
although she did indicate some general resemblances between humans and living
nonhuman primates which included close mother-infant bonds and affectionate
relationships. Just like the hunting hypothesis had preceded the baboon studies, the kernel of Woman the Gatherer was there before the chimpanzee model
emerged.
A much more elaborate argument than the twelve pages of Linton’s seminal
article was presented in the book Female of the Species (1975) by two American
anthropologists, Kay Martin and Barbara Voorhies. The book was largely a reply
to Lionel Tiger’s Men in Groups (1969) which we encountered in the context of
baboon studies. Martin and Voorhies (1975: 135) had ‘several reservations about
Tiger’s choice of savanna baboons as models for human society’: early hominid
ecology might have been different, the link between ecology and behaviour was
not straightforward, other baboon species also lived in forested areas, etc. They
write: ‘Lionel Tiger’s choice of the savanna baboon as a model of early human
behavior has colored his view of human evolution and of present-day societies’
because it introduced ‘sharp behavioral differences between the sexes’ (138) and
‘the equation of male aggressiveness with sexual competition’ (170). Instead, they
suggested that parallels be sought with the apes ‘which are more like humans anatomically, genetically, biochemically, and in susceptibility to particular diseases
than are baboons’ (140). Chimpanzees were to be preferred over gorillas because
they showed also many behavioural similarities:
If a single nonhuman primate group with the greatest relevancy for studies of human evolution is sought, chimpanzees appear to be the most highly qualified [...]
there are more similarities in the overall trends of chimp and human evolution
than with baboon and human evolution. We feel that these broad similarities
between chimps and human outweigh the similarity of common habitat between
baboons and early humans. (141)

Chimps triumphed over baboons and ecology was no longer a relevant similarity. The sheer number of similarities between chimps and humans had paled the
previously all-important criterion of sharing a terrestrial lifestyle in the savannah.
The authors proceeded with an alternative view of human evolution, similar to the
one suggested by Linton, where women took on a more central role. Interestingly,
they did appeal to Jolly’s seed-eating hypothesis to substantiate their claim that
hunting had not been essential in the earliest phases of human evolution.
With the work of Martin and Voorhies we see how the critique on Man the
Hunter widened to a critique on the baboon model and how the alternative of
Woman the Gatherer was substantiated with an invocation of chimpanzees. Martin
and Voorhies had not studied chimps in the wild, nor had Linton, or Tanner and
Zihlman (which I will discuss hereafter); their acquaintance with chimpanzees
came from publications of fieldwork. Although we find references to Itani’s research group in Mahale, no one has been more responsible for the representation

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of chimpanzees to the outside world than Jane Goodall. Her observations of the
Gombe chimps have been going on for nearly forty years now and have been paradigmatic for much research on great apes. In the shadow of man (1971), Goodall’s
first popularizing book, was translated into 48 languages, making it the best-read
work of non-fiction on any nonhuman primate in the world. Though not an outspoken feminist herself, her often anecdotal accounts of an animal society consisting of individual animals with life histories, friendships and feelings of their
own certainly appealed to anyone searching an alternative to the dry, mechanistic
descriptions of belligerent baboons (Goodall 1986). Even Goodall’s observations
of interspecific aggression, infanticide and cannibalism could not change that essentially peaceful picture of chimpanzees in the 1970s.
Nancy Tanner and Adrienne Zihlman, the joint venture of a cultural and a physical
anthropologist with a shared interest in human evolution and second-wave feminism,
became the most vociferous proponents of the chimp model. In a stream of publications
which started in 1976, they canonized the feminist alternative for Man the Hunter into
the textbook version as we know it today (Tanner and Zihlman 1976; Zihlman and
Tanner 1978; Tanner 1981; 1987; Zihlman 1978; 1981; 1985; 1990; 1992).36
Next to Goodall’s fieldwork, biomolecular evidence equally contributed to
that theory (Tanner 1987). Immunological studies, comparisons of protein sequences and comparisons of genetic material all converged on what anatomists
already assumed since Huxley: that the African apes, particularly chimpanzees,
are closer to humans than any other primate. In the 1970s, the figure of 99 % of
genetic identity was often given; in recent years most authors have been willing to
give in one percent, but the result is still rather impressive. (It seems as if ‘99 %’
is a magical figure in the rhetoric of evolutionary anthropology since this was also
the figure invoked by the Man the Hunter-supporters to indicate the percentage
of their time on earth that humans had been dependent on hunting.)
A more theoretical impetus came from the nascent field of sociobiology. The father
of sociobiology, E.O. Wilson (1975) had argued that apart from the classical Darwinian
mechanisms of natural selection and sexual selection, kin selection played an equally
crucial role in evolution and helped to explain such ostensibly incomprehensible behaviour like altruism. From Wilson, the chimp modellers borrowed the notion of parental
investment (or kin investment) and followed a suggestion on sexual selection made by
Trivers that ‘the sex investing the most energy in its offspring is the sex that chooses
its mates and thus influences the gene flow into the next generation’ (Zihlman 1981:
88).37 In other words, since females made the largest parental investment, they would
steer sexual selection, not the males. In trying to explain canine reduction and the loss
of sexual dimorphism, Tanner and Zihlman believed that ‘females were choosing precisely those males who were friendly, nurturing, tool-using, and willing to share food’
(Zihlman 1981: 96). Even if canine reduction was a process occurring in the male body,
females had been responsible for it. No matter how ingenious, it is hard not to hear the
36 For a particularly vivid and balanced history of Woman the Gatherer and Zihlman’s role therein, see
Haraway (1989: 331-48).
37 This idea is central to their hypothesis and can be found in all their articles (cf. Tanner and Zihlman
1976: 589; Tanner 1981: 158-67; Tanner 1987: 14; Zihlman 1985: 369).

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echoes of women’s sexual emancipation in the 1970s in lines like ‘females may have
come to prefer to mate more often with males who kissed effectively than with those
who growled at them and displayed large canines’ (Tanner 1987: 14) or ‘females probably had sex more frequently with those males who were around often, playing with
offspring, helping in protection, occasionally sharing meat and foraged plants, and who
were generally friendly’ (Tanner 1981: 164). Despite the androcentric bias they pointed
out in much earlier anthropology, their projection of the ideal seventies man into the
Plio-Pleistocene was no less value-free.
Another source of inspiration for Tanner and Zihlman was R.B. Lee’s ethnography of the !Kung. More than anyone else, Lee had demonstrated at the Man the
Hunter conference that hunting and meat-eating played only a relatively minor
role in a foraging society (Lee 1968). (Zihlman (1981: 91) went even so far to
call the resulting book a ‘misnamed volume’.) On another conference in the late
1960s, Lee had also argued that the first tool must have been a carrying device: ‘a
softened animal hide, a bark tray, a broad leaf, or a crude net’, in any case something perishable, since it had never been excavated (1979: 491). He believed that
such carrying device was ‘the essential prerequisite, the sine qua non, of human
economy’ which ‘made possible a human way of life’ (Lee 1979: 491). Even if Lee
was not clear whether it functioned in contexts of hunting, gathering or just as
a child sling after humans had lost their body hair (to which nonhuman primate
infants normally cling), the idea that another tool than a hunting weapon played
an evolutionary function was grist on the feminist mill.
A dissatisfaction with androcentric scenarios of human evolution based on
hunting, a critique of the baboon model, the availability of rich observations on
chimpanzees, the biomolecular evidence of a close affinity between chimps and
humans, the notion of female sexual selection cast in sociobiological terms, the
importance of gathering in a contemporary foraging society, and the women’s
movement of the 1970s, all these were the axes which converged on the gathering
hypothesis of Tanner and Zihlman (cf. Zihlman 1987 for a similar retrospect).
They erected a two-staged model of human evolution: first, there was an ancestral
population of hominids between 6 and 4 million years ago of which only few fossils had been found; second, a transitional population emerged when the ancestral
population moved into the open savanna and developed into australopithecines
between 4 and 2 million years ago. The first ones lived shortly after the hominidpongid divergence and could therefore be represented by extant chimpanzees; the
second ones had to be reconstructed on the basis of imagining how chimpanzees
would behave in an open habitat following the principles of female sexual selection, gathering economy and increased infant dependency. Not surprisingly, all
the quintessential human traits which were previously thought to be the result of
male hunting were now seen as the product of female activities. Gathering was the
prime mover and caused sharing (with offspring), tool use (digging sticks and containers), and bipedalism (required for gathering with a container). In their view,
women were the ‘primary socializers’; the mother-offspring bond, not the male
bond (Tiger 1969), was the basic social unit; and females, as suggested before,
were the ones who choose whom to have sex with—and thus determined canine

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reduction and decreased sexual dimorphism. Economically, technologically, and
anatomically, it was women who had determined most of human evolution.
Tanner and Zihlman’s evolutionary narrative did not greatly differ from Sally
Linton’s speculations whom they explicitly acknowledge (cf. Zihlman 1981: 369).
Originality was perhaps less the hallmark of their oft-repeated argument than
their capacity to draw together several lines of argument, rather eclectically sometimes, into a single hypothesis. Their alternative was, nevertheless, quite problematic. Whereas they had effectively laid bare the androcentric bias in many earlier
speculations, their own reconstructions were hardly less speculative (despite the
affirmative tone of their prose). In fact, they just presented an inversion of the
earlier models where women took over the responsibility of the evolving business. Hominization thus became ‘feminization’ (Stoczkowski 1996: 281). Frances
Dahlberg, editor of the volume Woman the Gatherer (1981: 27), had hoped that
with the end of the hunting hypothesis, grandiose origins stories would be over
as ‘heroic qualities seldom come into play in securing protein from catfish, termites, snail, gerbils, and baby baboons. But what is lost in drama’, she continued, ‘is gained in diversity and complexity.’ Her hopes notwithstanding, Woman
the Gatherer became an equally heroic, one-sided and unilinear tale of human
origins.
Feminist anthropologists crusaded not so much against the empirical implausibility of the hunting hypothesis as against its ideological undesirability. This is not to say
that the gathering hypothesis was only an ideological construct as opposed to a more
objective hunting paradigm, or that the former was bad science and the latter good. All
science is political, and certainly primatology (Haraway 1984). So-called external influences are not necessarily distorting, but can bring in new and promising perspectives:
prejudgements often provide fruitful angles of observation, they are in fact what makes
science possible. What is most objectionable in Tanner and Zihlman’s writings, however, is not so much their feminist bias (this in fact allowed them to detect androcentrism)
but their objectivist pretensions (the affirmative tone, the lack of doubt, the obliteration of speculation) in spite of their overt political agenda. Haraway (1984: 96), though
sympathetic to the feminist movement, rightly says that ‘struggles for feminist science
cannot proceed only by writing the tales one wants to be true’.38 Woman the Gatherer
was first of all ‘a contentious marriage of Euro-American feminism and biological humanism’ (Haraway 1989: 228). Reading through the feminist alternatives, one gets the
impression that all these several lines of evidence were only selected to corroborate the
basic hypothesis. The fact that Linton’s initial, chimpless gathering hypothesis did not
greatly differ from Tanner and Zihlman’s full-fledged chimp model, leads one to suspect
that the chimps were largely there for ornamental reasons. ‘In terms of the Gathering
Hypothesis per se,’ Tanner once wrote, ‘the Chimpanzee Model is not essential’ (1987:
12).39
38 Haraway’s feminism is obviously more ‘third wave’ than ‘second wave’. Whereas Tanner and Zihlman
were exponents of the second-wave combative women’s movement, Haraway better articulates the
more recent post-modern form of critical deconstruction (cf. Van Reybrouck 1998b).
39 She continued, however, by defending that the chimpanzee model was useful beyond the assertion
of gathering as the economic base.

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Of course, this criticism is written in an age where gender issues are high on
the agenda so that the position taken here can perhaps not fully come to the terms
with the ubiquity and tenacity of the hunting orthodoxy with its chauvinist connotations nor the aspirations felt by many for an alternative narrative of human
origins. Man the Hunter had been cast at a time when only very few women were
active in primatology. Indeed, it was only in the full 1970s that the sexual demography of the discipline showed a marked increase in female researchers in the
field, even to the extent that primatology is now sometimes heralded as a textbook
case of feminized science (Haraway 1984; Longino 1990: 103-11; Morell 1993;
Fedigan 1994; Fedigan and Strum 1997). It is no coincidence that an awareness
of male biases occurred simultaneously with a growing presence of women in
primatology. Be that as it may, it is still surprising that at the same time that in
archaeology speculation was abolished and subjected to a severely falsificationist and often fecund programme in the work of Isaac and Binford (Chapter 3),
speculation could flourish as never before in the study of human origins. Despite
their divergent appraisal and use of speculation in their work, Binford, Tanner and
Zihlman sided in the rejection of hunting in an early phase of human evolution.
For Binford, early hominids had been scavenging, for feminists they had been
gathering and for Jolly, as we have seen, they had been eating seeds. The deficit
of the hunting hypothesis was obvious, but the place of speculation in it varied
enormously. Perhaps this explains why the gathering hypothesis, though often reiterated by its authors and referred to by others as an example of feminized science
(Longino 1990: 103-11), never received much feedback in the form of intellectual
debate or overt resistance. The reaction was one of repressive tolerance. Bitterly
reflecting on this absence of debate, Zihlman (1987: 16) drew a comparison with
an odd game of tennis: ‘After a great power service, your opponent takes one look
at the ball, turns away, and walks off the court, refusing to return your serve.’

A perfect analogy
Even if American feminist anthropology, Woman the Gatherer and the chimp
model were largely intertwined (Tanner and Zihlman’s seminal writings all appeared in feminist publications), it would be erroneous to assume that the chimpanzee model was confined to feminists only. Others with less overt political
agendas equally turned to the chimps (Goodall and Hamburg 1975; Reynolds
1976; McGrew 1981), though they were outnumbered by the zealous publishing
of Tanner and Zihlman. In this section I want to analyse the structure of the analogical reasoning in all these texts. Since they resemble each other considerably,
I will discuss them as a whole and quote rather extensively from them. Feminists
and non-feminists alike reacted against the previous baboon model and considered the chimpanzee to be a better alternative. All these authors equally attempted
to outline a new theory of human origins. They shared the same ambition, turned
to the same conceptual tool and, despite their interpretative differences, went
through the same analogical steps of observing similarity, establishing relevance,
predicting similarity and building on that prediction.

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1) At the outset of any chimpanzee model lies the fascination with the intriguing similarities chimps and humans demonstrate. It was because of the greater number of resemblances that Martin and Voorhies (1975: 141) preferred the
chimp over the baboon. Concurring with that view, Goodall and Hamburg (1975:
15) wrote:
The chimpanzee, however, is a much closer relative of man than the baboon. This
is suggested by many lines of research into the biochemistry, physiology, anatomy,
and behavior of the chimpanzee. In all these areas there are striking similarities
between the chimpanzee and ourselves.

Others spoke of a ‘close affinity’ (McGrew 1981: 36) or ‘intimate biological ties’
(Tanner and Zihlman 1976: 591) and all mentioned the various forms of similarity between chimpanzees and modern humans. Tanner (1987: 7) named both
species ‘extremely similar and evidently closely related’ while Reynolds (1976: 68)
argued that chimpanzees were physically ‘not so far removed from the ancestral
Dryopithecines’.
2) This similarity, the argument continues, is not incidental but the result of
a phylogenetic closeness between both species. On the basis of anatomical resemblances, Victorian evolutionists like Huxley had already concluded that both
must have descended from a common ancestor. More recent molecular evidence
confirmed this position and tried to date the moment of divergence from the last
common ancestor; in general it was calculated to be somewhere along 5 million
years ago. As a consequence of the biomolecular revolution, phylogeny became
more important than ecology. Washburn and DeVore, Schaller and Lowther and
many others could still believe that ecology shaped behaviour, but Zihlman and
Tanner (1978: 171) rebutted that ‘ecological factors can influence but not determine social structure’:
Models based on particular adaptations, such as living in a savanna habitat,
cannot replace a more comprehensive model that includes not only ecological and
behavioral factors, but a common, recent evolutionary history—as the chimpanzee model does.

Ecological analogy as a criterion of relevant similarity thus made room for phylogenetic homology.
3) Because humans have so dramatically evolved since the hominid-pongid
split (as the fossil record aptly testifies) and since nothing is known about chimpanzee evolutionary history, it is assumed that chimps are much closer to the last
common ancestor. They were, therefore, used as living models for it. This crux of
the whole argument can be illustrated with many quotes. Goodall and Hamburg
(1975: 30) referred to ‘a hypothetical group of chimpanzees, or chimpanzeelike
creatures [...] that are undoubtedly similar in many ways to our own ancestors’.
McGrew (1981: 59) reasoned from ‘the chimpanzee-like early hominid’. Reynolds
(1976: 68) argued: ‘The model I want to suggest [...] for early hominid society is
the chimpanzee model.’ And Tanner and Zihlman, as could be expected, defended

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Figure 18. The frontispiece of Tanner’s On Becoming Human (1981) shows two female chimpanzees—a curious choice for a book on human evolution. The author, however, acknowledged the illustrator for having ‘translated the concepts and data into visual form’ (1981:
xvii). Following the argument of the book—which was the longest defense of a primate model
ever—the reader was eventually forced to admit that we had indeed become human from an
ancestral stratum of chimpanzee-like friendliness and sociability. The gently kissing, peacemaking chimps in the frontispiece did not only summarize her theory; they were also an indirect visual reply to DeVore’s widely-disseminated photograph of the aggressive, threatening,
barking, canine-displaying, solitary adult male (cf. Figure 15).

this point emphatically (Tanner and Zihlman 1976: 591, 596; Tanner 1981: 58,
65; 1987: 6, 15, 24; Zihlman 1987: 14; 1992: 415, 417). At one point, they
even simply stated that ‘living chimpanzees represent the kind of population from
which we evolved.’ (Tanner and Zihlman 1976: 588). The argument was even put in
visual form: the frontispiece of Nancy Tanner’s 1981 monograph On Becoming Human
depicted a line drawing of two female chimpanzees kissing each other, suggesting the
importance of female sociability and reconciliation (figure 18). Coincidence or not,
at this time the author started to sign her publications with her second name: Nancy
Makepeace Tanner. The numerous publications and extreme phrasing of the Tanner
and Zihlman tandem should not obliterate the widely-felt appropriateness of the chimp
model. To date, the chimpanzee is still regarded the most popular candidate for the best
model by many students of primate behaviour (cf. Infra).
4) After making the point that chimpanzee life resembled our ancestral existence before entering the savannah, most papers continued with lengthy descriptions of the social life of chimps—apparently believing that these pieces of natural
history prose could fill in the void of the missing link, that these descriptions were
actually arguments. Reynolds (1968: 69-72) did it, McGrew (1981: 37-57) did it,

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but the most extreme case is Tanner’s On Becoming Human (1981): after defending
a chimp model in Chapter 3, the next three chapters, all entitled ‘Chimpanzees
as a model of the ancestral population’, are strictly devoted to a description of
chimpanzees’ locomotion, tools, diet, social organization, interaction, mental capacities, communication, and ‘sociation’. In this, she follows the same evocative
procedure we have encountered in the textbooks on baboons in the early 1970s
and which we will find in Sollas’ prose on Tasmanians, Australians, Bushmen and
Eskimos. The chimp model was not a starting point for further explorations and
inferences, but served as an end point. Once the model defended, it sufficed to
simply describe how chimps behaved. Chimpanzees presented a living and tangible image of a remote past and the metaphor of such visualization became one
of the favourite rhetoric devices. Chimpanzees made it ‘possible to visualize how
the hominid line could have arisen’ Tanner and Zihlman held (1976: 596, italics
added). For Goodall and Hamburg (1975: 30), their hypothetical group of chimpanzees gave ‘a picture of a group of beings that are undoubtedly similar in many
ways to our own ancestors’ (Goodall and Hamburg 1975: 30; italics added). No
matter that all authors warned that chimps were of course not really living ancestors (Reynolds 1976: 68; McGrew 1981: 37; Tanner 1987: 26), most continued
unhindered by these cautions. The invariable defence of such models was that
they had a ‘heuristic value’—they could at least suggest new ideas. Now few words
are so abused in primatological arguments as the word ‘heuristic’, because often
it only serves to claim something which the author cannot really prove; it gives a
licence to turn an idea into a fact without further ado. Whenever a step of one’s
argument is poorly elaborated, it suffices to call it ‘heuristic’ to move on. Chimps
were said to be only heuristic sources, but they continued to be holistically projected into the past. Despite such formulaic apology, they effectively functioned
as our beginnings, the ab Urbe condita of humanity.
5) ‘By using the conservative chimpanzees as a model of the ancestral population, we gain a starting point,’ Tanner wrote (1981: 65). After having projected chimpanzees into the past, chimp modellers sent them ‘back to the future’
through a different habitat, this time the savannah. All authors developed the
experimental mind game of imagining how a group of chimpanzees would survive
in the savannah, hoping to find out how early hominids had done. Goodall and
Hamburg (1975) steered their ‘hypothetical group of chimpanzees’ into the open
savannah and came up with hunting, Tanner and Zihlman (1976) with gathering
and McGrew (1981) with cognitive maps and host of other assets. On the basis
of limited evidence and with a malleable actor like the chimpanzee on stage, everyone could construct his or her own scenario according to personal preference.
Though nearly all authors admitted the speculative character of their ‘just-so story’, most of them defended the necessity of such speculation. McGrew (1981: 58,
original italics) was most honest about it: ‘Although the arguments are speculative,
I shall present them definitively, for the sake of convenience.’
What happened with the chimpanzee model is a classical example of what logicians have called ‘the fallacy of the perfect analogy’ (Fischer 1970; Wylie 1985):

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The fallacy of the perfect analogy consists in reasoning from a partial resemblance between two entities to an entire and exact correspondence. It is an erroneous inference from the fact that A and B are similar in some respects to the
false conclusion that they are the same in all respects. One must always remember
that an analogy, by its very nature, is a similarity between two or more things
which are in other respects unlike. A “perfect analogy” is a contradiction in terms,
if perfection is understood, as it commonly is in this context, to imply identity.
(Fischer 1970: 247)

The chimpanzee model was defended on the basis of similarity made relevant
through phylogenetic closeness. And although in the case of chimps and modern
humans this similarity (both in number and in variety) and phylogenetic affinity is unmistakable, it can never entail that the source analogue be projected as a
whole on the target. This is even more so since the target consisted of fossil hominids, not modern humans; it must not be forgotten that the observed similarity between chimps and hominids was asserted only indirectly through the resemblance
with modern humans. Analogical reasoning consists of the transfer of certain attributes of the source to the target. In the case of the chimpanzee model, the similarity was so much stressed that the relation of analogy became one of identity.
This is to be taken very literally: people did indeed assert that ‘living chimpanzees
represent the kind of population from which we evolved’ (Tanner and Zihlman
1976: 588). The chimpanzee model did not so much serve to draw inferences
about the past as to represent an image in flesh and blood of how it might have
been. As a result, chimpanzees served as contemporary ancestors just like the savages had done in the schemes of Morgan, Tylor and Sollas. Whereas defending
the source analogue would normally be a starting point for further inquiries, in
the case of the chimpanzee model, as in nineteenth century evolutionism, it was
an end point. Once the similarity assessed, most authors simply went on to give
a description of chimpanzee social life as if it substituted reasoning about early
hominid society. A perfect analogy erroneously assumes that partial similarity implies total identity, and becomes, therefore, tautological. The problem, however, is
that one never knows anything else about the last common ancestor that was not
already known about the common chimpanzee; the uniqueness of the former can
never be known. The distance between the two has been obliterated by projecting
the one onto the other. Rather than a window to the past, the chimpanzee source
has turned into a closed shutter.
This projective method based on overall similarity had two important consequences: the neglect of differences and the restriction to older periods (Tooby
and DeVore 1987: 187). Indeed, the chimpanzee model in general stressed similarities at the expense of differences. With the notable exception of Goodall and
Hamburg (1975), most authors remained rather silent about the obvious differences. Whereas the earliest workers on baboons had been intrigued by the differences they presented to modern man, whereas carnivore and gelada modellers had
tried to deal with the many dissimilarities between their source and target, now
any discussion of difference was anathematized. Zihlman concluded a recent paper with the remark that ‘it is the similarities between chimpanzees and human,

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rather than the differences, that need to be emphasized in order to understand this
earliest stage of hominid evolution’ (1990: 194).
The fact that similarity was the all-important criterion also explains why
chimpanzees were never used for more recent stages of human evolution, like
Homo erectus, where the distance between source and target is obviously bigger.
‘Women in evolution, part II’ (Zihlman 1978), the sequel to the seminal paper
by Tanner and Zihlman (1976), dealt with the later australopithecines and Homo
erectus. Not surprisingly, chimpanzees are entirely absent from the speculations
here. Just like in the early seventies’ textbooks, chimps were thought to represent
the earliest hominids in the first act of hominization—the reason no longer being
an ecological analogy but an overemphasized similarity.

The seductiveness of similarity
Compared to the careful analogical reasoning we encountered in the carnivore
and gelada models, the chimpanzee model was logically far less refined. It pivoted
around the notion of phylogenetic homology which assumes that genetic similarity automatically entails behavioural similarity. Kortlandt (1986: 126), however,
called the assumption of homology of behaviour ‘a risky inference scientifically’:
One may all too easily apply such circular arguments as: “Because chimpanzee
and man are closely related, similar elements in their basic behaviour are probably homologous and, therefore, date back from the common ancestor.” These and
similar errors of reasoning occur abundantly among chimpanzee researchers as
well as among anthropologists.

Nevertheless, the model’s proponents tried to narrow the distance between source
and target by enumerating as many similarities as possible—even to the extent that
the analogue sides conflated with each other. In the end, the chimpanzee model
of the late 1970s and early 80s obfuscated rather than elucidated the last common
ancestor. Phylogenetic affinity is not taxonomic or behavioural identity.
In contrast to the social carnivores and the geladas, the chimpanzee was of
course a less remote source—it presented a ‘manifest’ rather than an ‘imported
analogue’ (Leatherdale 1974)—but eventually this similarity was rather disadvantageous than beneficial. This is not to deny that chimpanzees stand indeed much
closer to the last common ancestor than a gelada baboon—of course they do—but
the problem is that there is no way to know how different they are from the last
common ancestor and how much they have evolved since the hominid-pongid
divergence. Most scholars have assumed that, whereas hominids had evolved dramatically over the course of the last 4 million years, chimpanzees were much more
static, both anatomically and behaviourally. Tanner called them ‘conservative’!
The fact that absolutely nothing was known about chimpanzee fossil history in
the last 5 million years was more of a profit than a problem to chimpanzee modellers: it gave them a licence to assume that chimps had not changed.
Yet chimpanzees have changed. It is now accepted that they manifest regional
and cultural traditions and that these variations in behavioural patterns can emerge
and spread rather rapidly (McGrew 1992; De Waal and Seres 1997). Furthermore,
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recent research has acquainted us with the social and sexual life of the bonobo.
The chimpanzee-bonobo split is calculated on the basis of genetic divergence to
have occurred as recently as 2 million years ago. Apparently, it took only two million years to produce the substantial differences in the behaviour of both species
(De Waal and Lanting 1997: 23-47; but see Stanford 1998)! No matter whether
it was the bonobo or the chimpanzee who moved away from the ancestral stock
(or both), this lesson teaches that chimpanzee species are susceptible to rapid,
evolutionary change.
These are of course recent findings and it is not fair to criticize past knowledge
in history of science with new evidence, especially if this evidence comes from a
species which was still largely unknown in the late 1970s. Yet even at the moment
this knowledge on bonobos became available, it was not summoned to rebut the
chimpanzee model but cast instead into a new and even more radical version of
it: the bonobo model.

Bonobos
Bonobos were discovered only very recently compared to the other great apes.
Although one of the two chimps Robert Yerkes kept as pets was clearly a bonobo,
the animal was not recognized as belonging to a different taxon. It was only in
1929 that bonobos were first raised to the subspecies level (Pan satyrus paniscus,
Schwarz 1929) and a few years later to the species level (Pan paniscus, Coolidge
1933). By then, chimps had been known and described for about three centuries,
orang-utans for two centuries and gorillas for one. This tardy appearance on the
zoological scene explains why until very recently so little was known about this
animal. If anatomical studies on skins and skeletons raised already considerable
taxonomic uncertainty, how much more elusive was the behaviour of so timid an
animal! Political unrest in Congo, the only country where bonobos occur in the
wild, further frustrated the possibility of setting up long-term research stations.
Indeed, up to well in the 1980s, very little was understood of the bonobos social
life in the wild (Susman 1984; Kano 1992; De Waal and Lanting 1997). It is
therefore not surprising that the first bonobo models for human evolution were
by and large based on anatomical and biomolecular research rather than behavioural studies. At the outset the scope of this analysis was limited to behavioural
models. The bonobo model, however, cannot be neglected as it belonged to the
long-standing discussion on primate modelling, had developed out of the previous chimp model (its main proponent was Adrienne Zihlman) and, most importantly, gave rise to one of the most interesting discussions on the use of models in
the history of primatology.

The disputed bonobo model
After the sweeping statements of Woman the Gatherer had been made, Zihlman
turned back to the intricacies of her own discipline—physical anthropology—by
conducting research on the skeleton of bonobos. In two papers co-authored by
Douglas Cramer and published in the same year, she sought to understand the

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skeletal differences between chimps and bonobos and the extent of sexual dimorphism in the latter (Zihlman and Cramer 1978; Cramer and Zihlman 1978).
She concluded that bonobos were not simply a scaled down version of common
chimpanzees and that sexual dimorphism, especially in the cranial and facial regions, was absent. Though dealing with localized morphological problems, in several places the papers suggested more broadly that ‘pygmy chimpanzees’ (as they
were still called then) could be ‘the most similar of living primates to the common ancestor of man and African apes’ (Zihlman and Cramer 1978: 86). Nearly
half a century earlier, Coolidge (1933: 56) had already assumed that the bonobo
‘may approach more closely to the common ancestor of chimpanzees and man
than does any living chimpanzee hitherto discovered an described’; Zihlman drew
upon that prediction in her morphological comparison of bonobo skeletons with
australopithecine fossils (1979).
This hint became the main theme of an article published in Nature in 1978
under the unmistakable title ‘Pygmy chimpanzee as a possible prototype for the
common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees and gorillas’. The physical anthropologists Cramer and Zihlman (who was the first author) were sided by biomolecular
researchers Cronin and Sarich in their claim that ‘pygmy chimpanzees present
a general pattern from which other African hominoids could have developed’
(Zihlman et al. 1978: 744-5). The argument was supported by four converging
lines of evidence: biochemical research supplied a cladogram in which the two
chimpanzee species split apart ca. 2 Myr ago (well after the hominid-pongid divergence dated at 4 Myr); morphological studies showed that pygmy chimps were
not smaller than chimps but simply more ‘generalized’; behavioural observations
in captivity and in the wild, even if few, suggested that bonobos were highly intelligent, socially flexible and inclined to bipedalism; palaeontological comparison
indicated many similarities between skeletons from bonobos and gracile australopithecines (cf. Zihlman 1979). These taken together led to the conclusion that of
all living apes the bonobo had retained most of the ancestral character states and
could therefore be seen as prototypical (figure 19). Whereas the chimpanzee had
diverged away from the ancestral stem to become what they are now, the bonobo
was thought to have changed less so that it offered ‘the best prototype of the
prehominid ancestor’ (Zihlman et al. 1978: 744). The gist of this argument was
again based on notions of similarity: biochemical similarity to modern humans,
anatomical similarity to australopithecines and vague behavioural resemblances
with the human pattern. The idea was not so much to infer certain attributes on
the basis of shared attributes (observed similarities), but to present a life-image of
this common ancestor of which no fossils were known. As was the case with the
chimpanzee model, once the bonobo was sufficiently defended as a suitable source
analogue, the inquiry came to a halt. Rather than serving as a base for further inferences, the bonobo model seemed to satisfy the need for an immediate image.
It is not accidental that in this context the metaphor of visualization and imagery
occurs. Zihlman (1996: 301) wrote that the bonobo had been ‘useful in visualizing the transition from quadrupedalism to bipedalism’.

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Figure 19. Morphology formed one of the key arguments of the bonobo model. This illustration
appeared in Nature to suggest general similarity between a bonobo and an australopithecine
skull; critics said it forced this similarity (Zihlman et.al. 1978: figure 2)

Compared to her other work, these papers by Zihlman (and her co-authors) were
rather technical and more neutral in tone. The explicit feminist agenda and its speculative offshoot, the gathering hypothesis, were entirely absent from them.40 Although
bonobo society would eventually turn out to be matriarchal and based on female coalitions—observations in line with the feminist claim of female centrality—this was still
unknown in the late 1970s.41 The crux of the bonobo model lay in biochemistry and
morphology, not in ethology. Whereas the chimpanzee model was proposed in the first
issue of a then unknown feminist journal, the bonobo model saw the light of day in the
pinnacle of academic publishing, the weekly Nature. Despite its more academic appearance and granted scientific credentials (or perhaps precisely due to these), the bonobo
model was severely criticized from several angles.42
In 1981 three papers appeared which replied independently to the Nature paper (McHenry and Corruccini 1981; Johnson 1981; Latimer et al. 1981). The
authors came from displinary backgrounds as diverse as morphology, mammalian
palaeontology and palaeoanthropology, and their criticisms appeared in periodicals
40 Only in a more popular paper like Zihlman’s fanciful interview with the fossil hominid ‘Ruby’
(named after the Rolling Stones’ Ruby Tuesday...), does the bonobo model and the gathering hypothesis intermingle (Zihlman and Lowenstein 1983a).
41 More recently, Zihlman (1996: 301) has stressed the importance of the behavioural findings of ‘the
female-centric features of their society’.
42 In fact, articles in Science and Nature are perhaps by definition the most heavily criticized scientific
publications (cf. the storm of protest released by Lovejoy’s 1981 Science paper). Authors publishing
in these weeklies certainly live up to one of Oscar Wilde’s less famous aphorisms: ‘there is only one
thing worse than being talked about, that is not being talked about’.

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such as the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Current Anthropology and
the Journal of Human Evolution. Henry McHenry and Robert Corruccini were
both physical anthropologists working on primate morphology who after comparing bonobo skeletons with chimpanzees, moderns humans and fossil hominids found themselves disagreeing with Zihlman and her co-authors on nearly all
points. Firstly, although they acknowledged the differences between the bonobo
and the chimpanzee, almost all differences they believed were simply ‘due to size
differences and the effect of allometry’ (McHenry and Corruccini 1981: 364).
Secondly, although the bonobo was slightly more like modern humans in some
respects (such as limb proportions), in other respects (like shoulder and hip morphology) the chimpanzee was closer—the bonobo not bearing any nearer resemblance to humans. Thirdly, although there were some similarities between bonobos
and fossil hominids, ‘the special resemblance generally disappears with allometric
correction’ (364). Point by point, the authors undermined Zihlman’s claims by
emphasizing the effects of allometry on the skeletons, i.e. the evolutionary process
whereby specific morphological differences are the result of overall scaling rather
than localized adaptation. Metric differences between bonobos and chimps would
be caused by such process since ‘Pan paniscus is an allometrically scaled version of
P. troglodytes’ (361). What they actually did in logical terms was adding a notion
of relevance to the similarities and dissimilarities by invoking allometry. Yes, there
were indeed differences between bonobos and chimps but these were not relevant
considering the effect of scaling. And yes, there were similarities between bonobos
and hominids but these were equally irrelevant and disappeared if you accounted
for allometry. Allometry was the causal pattern which determined the relevance of
observed (dis)similarities. Consequently, the last common ancestor did not find
a privileged prototype in the bonobo any more than in the chimpanzee; it simply
had ‘some special features in common with each of its living descendants’ (364).
The mammalian palaeontologist Steven C. Johnson expanded this critique by
incorporating an explanation for the allometric process. In an article in Current
Anthropology he expressed his doubts as to whether bonobos could really be seen
as generalized and therefore reminiscent of an ancestral state. He argued that there
was good reason for believing that these animals were recently specialized insular dwarfs instead of generalized hominid prototypes. To him, bonobo morphology showed an adaptation to a more terrestrial form of locomotion than the one
seen with chimpanzees. The limited sexual dimorphism and the small size of the
mandible and teeth contrasted sharply with the oldest known fossil hominids of
that date, Australopithecus afarensis. These features were in his view the result of
a specific adaptation, not an ancestral relic, in what Johnson calls ‘a “terrestrial”
island of tropical forest’ (1981: 364). Just like the small Pleistocene hippopotamus on Cyprus and the shrunk Holocene mammoths on Siberia’s Wrangel Island,
bonobos had undergone a process of ‘insular dwarfing’—their ‘island’ being a
stretch of tropical forest formed by the Congo river in the north and a more arid
environment in the south. Johnson built upon the theory of allometry suggested
by McHenry and Corruccini by giving an ecological and biogeographical reason
for it: ‘Cranial and dental differences between bonobos and common chimpanzees

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may be attributable to allometric effects of dwarfing that occurred in the bonobo’s
tropical-forest “island” home range’ (Johnson 1981: 364). Rather than icons of
early humanity, bonobos appeared as specialized adaptations to a relatively small
patch of tropical rainforest.
Following Current Anthropology’s standard protocol for leading articles,
Johnson’s paper was followed by an expert discussion. Of the twelve respondents,
only two were opposed to his thesis (Zihlman being one of them), four did not
speak out and six wholeheartedly supported his view. One of the respondents
(D.J. Chivers) even named the bonobo model ‘an idea I have always found silly’
(365). With comments ranging from palynological arguments to discussions on
‘postcanine maxillary tooth area’, there is no point in summarizing this multifaceted debate but it might be more interesting to zoom on Zihlman’s comments and
Johnson’s reply. Zihlman reiterated her biochemical, morphological, behavioural
and palaeontological argument. While admitting that, biochemically, bonobos are
as close to humans as chimps, their limited sexual dimorphism and their ‘striking similarities’ to the morphology of A. africanus still made them a better candidate. ‘Finally,’ she wrote, ‘his argument [Johnson’s] that P. paniscus is an insular
dwarf, though not living on an island and not a dwarf, is purely speculative’ (372).
Johnson replied in an equally irritable way. The similarities Zihlman had observed
with early hominids were of no value, he wrote:
comparative measurement is not comparative anatomy and raw measurements
compiled without regard for the specific morphology and adaptations of the forms
being compared are of little value. [...] I have obtained identical measurements
[to the dimensions in Australopithecus and bonobo] from such disparate forms as
Macropus rufus (the red kangaroo, a saltatorial marsupial) and Felis concolor
(the puma, a digitigrade carnivore). [...] The “striking” metric similarities noted
by Zihlman do not demonstrate close morphological or phylogenetic affinity between hominids and bonobos. (Johnson 1981: 373)

Again, the critique was on the neglect of considering the actual relevance of the
similarities found. There was no point in comparing measurements if one did
not know what they actually meant. Unlike Zihlman, Johnson did not look for
a living, visualizable representative of the common ancestor; much better models could be found among the Miocene hominoids, he thought. A living-primate
model was not imperative: ‘Zihlman asks if I “believe” that apes and humans had
a common ancestor that was like gibbons, chimpanzees, or gorillas. I choose not
to believe in hypotheses, but instead to formulate and test them’ (373).
If Johnson’s words were harsh, the article by Latimer, White, Kimbel, Johanson and
Lovejoy (1981) was even more damning. From its title (‘The pygmy chimpanzee is not a
living missing link in human evolution’) to its conclusion, this paper marshalled all possible arguments against a bonobo model. It rejected Zihlman’s evidence, criticized her
methodology, indicated logical fallacies, refuted her hypothesis with new fossil evidence,
appealed to the authority of Darwin and named the use of her illustrations ‘selective’.
The authors undermined Zihlman’s four lines of reasoning: molecular evidence did not
favour the bonobo over the chimpanzee; in the absence of fossils, bonobo morphology

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on its own could not determine whether the species was generalized or specialized;
behavioural information was anecdotal and inconclusive; palaeontological comparison
was useless if only body size (instead of form) is included.43 At the end of the paper,
the bonobo model looked like a town through which the troops had passed. In logical terms, the arguments summoned by this offensive came down to what other critics
had done too: weighing the alleged similarity in terms of its genuine relevance. Either
the similarity was accidental and therefore not relevant, or it was forced, or it was nonexistent. Accidental: ‘Similarities between hominid and bonobo skulls are fortuitous,
illustrating basic architectural parallels instead of close cladogenetic association’ (480).
Forced: ‘Lateral line drawings of the toothless Sts 5 cranium and an adult Pan paniscus
are described as “similar”. [...] Resemblances here relate to the common plan of hominoid cranial structure rather than any special phylogenetic affinity.’ (482). Non-existent:
‘No published biochemical results suggest that Pan paniscus bears any special relationship with the hominid clade or that it best exemplifies the hominid ancestor’ (479).
Instead of an over-reliance on a single living species like the bonobo, the authors with
their shared background in palaeoanthropology urged to turn to the fossil record as the
prime source of evidence concerning human evolution. Living primates provided ‘no
substitute for scientific investigation of the fossil record’ (485).
From McHenry’s careful refutation of the morphological side of the bonobo
model over Johnson’s alternative explanation for the patterns observed we have
now come to a unmitigated critique against it in the article by Latimer et alii,
which even evolved into a generic scepticism against any ‘evolutionary scenario
based on an extant animal’ (485). While Zihlman once complained about the lack
of debate on the gathering hypothesis, now her ‘powerful service’ was returned
with equal, or even stronger force. After that triple attack, the debate on the
bonobo model turned into a stubborn trench warfare during the following years.
On several occasions, Zihlman restated the model though she never mentioned
the paper by Latimer et alii. Her claim was, however, less affirmative since the
lines of evidence only ‘slightly favor a Pan paniscus-like model’ (Zihlman 1996:
301):
In response to these objections, we do not claim that Pan paniscus is an ideal prototype in every particular, but rather that, of the living hominoids, this species is
probably more like the common ancestor of humans and apes—more so than the
common chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, or gibbon. (Zihlman and Lowenstein
1983b: 689)

Her colleague Cronin (1983: 133) believed it was still ‘a viable hypothesis’: ‘If
nothing else, it serves a heuristic purpose,’ he wrote. McHenry, on the other hand,
took ‘over 20,000 measurements’ to conclude that ‘no extant hominoid has an exclusive claim on affinities to Australopithecus’ (McHenry 1984: 203, 218). And so
on. People were at pains to be proved right, but the discussion was basically over.
43 Parallel to Johnson’s reference to kangaroos and pumas, the authors claimed that ‘none of the metrics
used by Zihlman separate a female black bear (Ursus americanus) from the bonobo’ (Latimer et al.
1981: 482).

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Bonobo behaviour
At the time the bonobo debate got overheated, an understanding of how this
primate behaved in captivity and in the wild was still very much in its infancy.
Latimer and his co-authors rightly summarized the contemporary knowledge on
bonobo behaviour as ‘inconclusive’, ‘anecdotal’ and ‘poorly documented’ (1981:
481). Not surprisingly, its impact on the debate surrounding the bonobo model was consequently rather limited. Yet at the time the argument raged on in
American scientific journals, observers in the African forest were making groundbreaking observations on the social and sexual life of these animals. As so often
in the history of primatological fieldwork, the way was paved by the efforts of
Japanese scholars. In the early 1980s authors like Kano, Kitamura, Kuroda and
Mori published the first results of their observations on the bonobos at Wamba
in Primates, the English-language journal of the primate research group at Kyoto
University. Around the same time, the Irish-South African couple Badrian and
Badrian reported intriguing observations from their field station at Lomako. And
in North-America, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s experiments with the language capacities of the bonobo Matata and its prodigious child Kanzi steered the attention
beyond the bones, teeth and molecules of the species. In 1984 the first book on
the bonobo was published, an edited volume containing seventeen chapters on the
biology and behaviour of the species (Susman 1984). The book was hailed as ‘a
sensational contribution to the field of primatology’ with an eminent power ‘as a
catalyst for future research on hominoid evolution’ (Dahl 1986: 99).
In the decade following this enthusiastic outcry, the knowledge on bonobos expanded tremendously (Hebert and Courtois 1994). Bonobos were seen to use tools in
the wild and in captivity (Walraven, Van Elsacker and Verheyen 1993; Van Elsacker and
Walraven 1994; Ingmanson 1996), to hunt, eat and share meat in the wild (Ihobe 1992;
Hohmann and Fruth 1993) and to recognize themselves in mirrors (Walraven, Van
Elsacker and Verheyen 1995). More than anything else, the tension-regulating function
of their abundant sexual life, which includes frontal copulation, homosexual contacts
(particularly between females) and other reconciliatory mountings, has received widespread attention (De Waal 1987). A social system based on female dominance and
female coalitions coupled with an absence of rigid hierarchies has not ceased to fire scientific and public imagination ever since its discovery. Comparisons and contrasts with
the common chimpanzee were repeatedly drawn: more peaceful, more sexual and less
chauvinist, bonobos were presented as the late-twentieth version of the noble savage,
in strong contrast to chimpanzees who had been observed to commit infanticide, cannibalism and lethal territoriality. De Waal wrote: ‘The chimpanzee resolves sexual issues
with power; the bonobo resolves power issues with sex’ (De Waal and Lanting 1997: 32;

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but see Stanford 1998 and Vervaecke, De Vries and Van Elsacker 2000).44 Book-length
publications followed: Kano published a substantial monograph (Kano 1992; translation of his 1986 work in Japanese); De Waal wrote a more popular account which was
lavishly illustrated with photographs by Lanting (De Waal and Lanting 1997) and a
narrative report of the first Belgian bonobo expeditions appeared (Draulans 1998).45
With this eruption of field studies and publications on bonobo behaviour one would
expect the bonobo model to be rapidly rekindled, especially since the opinion started to
be voiced that hominization might equally have taken place in the forest rather than in
the savannah (Susman 1987; Boesch-Achermann and Boesch 1994).46 Frans de Waal—
one of the principal experts on bonobos—wrote that bonobos with their stronger inclination to bipedal locomotion than chimpanzees ‘look as if they stepped straight out
of an artist’s impression of early hominids’ (De Waal 1995: 58). Yet despite this baffling
correspondence to expectations of what early hominids might have looked like, De
Waal voiced the changed climate of opinion when he refrained from using bonobos as
a model:
Rather than favoring parallels with one or the other ape, there is no need to choose
between the two. Those who for ideological reasons are inclined to advocate the
bonobo as the model of the missing link should realize that evolutionary biology
does not permit such selective attention. One cannot nibble on a little piece of it
without swallowing the entire pie’ (De Waal and Lanting 1997: 143).

Against the bonobo modellers, he argued that ‘no extant species can be adopted as model’—on the contrary, ‘the most successful reconstruction of our past will be based on a
broad triangular comparison of chimpanzees, bonobos, and ourselves within [a] larger
evolutionary context’ (142, 143). Comparing chimps and bonobos was increasingly

44 Stanford (1998) has argued that the differences between bonobos and chimps have been overemphasized: the dominance of studies in captivity have led to an overrepresentation of sexual activity,
whereas the amount of observation in the wild has been too limited to report such rare and dramatic
behaviours like infanticide. His view may, however, be somewhat ‘chimpocentric’, considering the
reactions of bonobo-experts (Parish, Fruth, De Waal in Stanford 1998), but it is certainly the case
that chimps have been portrayed as much more aggressive now that bonobos are on the scene (cf.
Wrangham and Peterson 1997). The issue will probably not be settled in the near future. Despite the
increased interest in wild bonobos, Congo’s political turmoil of the past years has drastically limited
the possibilities of ongoing fieldwork in the equatorial forest.
45 The boundary between popular and academic publications has become rather fluid in recent primatology (cf. Haraway 1989: 128-9). All books by Frans de Waal (Chimpanzee Politics, Peacemaking
among Primates, Good-Natured and Bonobo) are at once writings destined for a lay audience and influential arguments in primatological debates. More than collections of anecdotes, these books present
interpretative schemes which escape the rigid statistical requirements of journals like International
Journal of Primatology and American Journal of Primatology. This ensures not only mercantile but also
academic success: the popularity of De Waal’s books outside the discipline makes him a voice to be
heard within the discipline and vice versa. ‘Popular’ books are nowadays among the most powerful
rhetorical devices within primatology.
46 These proposals bring the argument of ecological analogy back in by the back door, after it had been
silenced with the decline of the baboon model. Apart from biochemical, anatomical, behavioural and
palaeontological similarity, the ecologies of both source and target species would also correspond.

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seen as a means to understand evolutionary principles of primate adaptation, and
these principles were also felt to be more relevant to human evolution than just
projections.47
At the very moment when evidence on bonobo behaviour was becoming available, the interest in constructing a single-species model seemed no longer alive
(even Zihlman (1996) spent very little attention to bonobo ethology). Why was
this? What happened between the initial enthusiasm for bonobos in the mid1980s and the dismissal of a model-building attempt hardly more than ten years
later? Were the bonobos themselves to be blamed for this decreased interest? Not
in the least. In fact, they were the ideal stuff for primate modelling; bonobos behaved in ways that went beyond the modellers’ wildest dreams. If their behaviour
had been well-documented in the 1970s, Woman the Gatherer would have been
certainly flanked by a bonobo model instead of a chimpanzee one. If not the animals themselves, what else? Perhaps the reason for this decline was already alluded
to in the last sentences of Latimer et alii’s critique: ‘An evolutionary scenario rigidly based on an extant animal like the pygmy chimpanzee suffers from an inherent inability to adjust its parameters in accomodating new types of relevant data’
(Latimer et al. 1981: 485). Not just the bonobo, but any single primate species
had become doubtful for reconstructing human evolution. Now that bonobos
started to be understood, a crisis of traditional modelling emerged.
Bonobos were somehow like the Tasmanians invoked by Tylor at the end of
the nineteenth century: they presented the best case for modelling, but they were
discovered too late, or at least at moment when criticism against this sort of analogical reasoning began to emerge. Just like the remarks of Boas and Westermarck
made the use of the comparative method for projection rather doubtful, a number
of primatologists started to reject the tradition of drawing single-species models.

Entrapped by resemblance
Just like chimpanzees, bonobos functioned as source analogues which were projected wholesale onto the target. They were never used for any other stage than
the one they were thought to most closely resemble, i.e. the ancestral state at the
hominid-pongid split. Similarity was supposed to imply identity, so that the fallacy of the perfect analogy was again committed. And even if, later, the bonobo
modellers did ‘not claim that Pan paniscus is an ideal prototype in every particular’
(Zihlman and Lowenstein 1983b: 689) or that ‘no living primate is identical in
all respects to the hominid ancestor’ (Zihlman 1996: 301), ideally the best model
would still be one which is identical in all respects. Even if bonobos were not
ideal, they scored best. The quality of the model was still read off of its degree of
similarity.

47 According to several authors, the difference between bonobos and chimps had to be explained because of the gorilla-free environment the former lived in. Not having to share the available food
resources, bonobos lived in a rich habitat where food stress could not cause competition.

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The bonobo model was not so much a device for future research as an end
point in itself. Once it was argued that bonobos were closest to the last common
ancestor, the argument, again, stopped. Apparently, the aim was not so much to
draw analogical inferences or to formulate model-based expectations but simply
to give a vivid image (or at least an approximation of it) of our common ancestor.
Illustration, not demonstration, was the purpose of the bonobo model. Perhaps
this is the best proof that reasoning from identity always becomes tautological:
the moment the distance between source and target is said to be close to nothing,
little more can be added in terms of explanation.
The debate surrounding the bonobo model, however, marks one of the most interesting episodes in the history of primate modelling because for the first time a singlespecies model was criticized by contemporary experts. The baboon model had only
been rejected after more than a decade, the chimpanzee model met with no resistance
at all, but the bonobo model initiated a whole battery of criticisms in the early 1980s.
No matter how diverse, the counter-arguments mostly came down to the awareness that
‘similarity is not enough’. Critics of the bonobo model put into practice Copi’s (1972:
358) warning that ‘it should not be thought that there is any simple numerical ratio between the number of points of ressemblance asserted in the premises and the probability
of the conclusion’. Whereas the chimpanzee modellers were seduced with impunity by
the similarity of chimps to modern humans and indirectly to hominids, the advocates
of the bonobo model could no longer get away with that. Similarities and phylogenetic
closeness notwithstanding, the last common ancestor might still have been very different from what we see today: bonobos have evolved, too. Frans de Waal, for example,
has argued that the female coalitions and the female dominance among bonobos are not
ancestral relics but aspects of a social adaptation which emerged to reduce infanticide
(De Waal and Lanting 1997).48
Despite the aspiration of finding a life image of the remote past, the awareness that a species’ behaviour is the result of particular historical and evolutionary
processes lay at the base of the rethinking of the conceptual foundations of primate modelling after 1985.

The crisis of traditional modelling
The edited volume The Evolution of Human Behavior: Primate Models (Kinzey
1987) is without doubt the most important publication in the history of primate modelling. Based on a symposium at the annual meeting of the American
Anthropological Association in Chicago in 1983, the resulting book brought
48 Though rarely made explicit, most of De Waal’s work is characterized by this ‘historical’ view on
social organization. To him, the animals’ social life is not only influenced by the selective pressures
of the environment but also by the social history of the community. His book on the power struggle
among male chimpanzees at Arnhem zoo essentially presented a historical narrative of social changes
in one such community (De Waal 1982). His recent interpretation of bonobo behaviour was built
on the idea that it developed through time as a means of reducing infanticide by males (De Waal
and Lanting 1997). Finally, his most recent work dealt with the origin and dissemination of cultural
patterns like handclasp grooming through time (De Waal and Seres 1997). Historical time is a key
concept in much of De Waal’s evolutionary interpretations.

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together specialists from different fields who discussed the relative merits of existing primate models, scrutinized the theoretical and methodological problems
which primate modelling involved, and set out lines for future research. The volume, however, was not so much groundbreaking as a whole but elegantly demonstrated a historical transition which had taken place in the ideas on primate models. Some of the chapters continued in the time-honoured tradition of modelling
based on single species: the book opened with Tanner’s re-defence of the chimpanzee model and the gathering hypothesis, Susman proposed to learn more from
bonobos and, rather originally, Crockett suggested that South-American howler
monkeys might provide a fresh way of looking at hominids. It was the usual advocacy of certain species as ‘better models’, often based on personal preference or
individual acquaintance with this or that animal. The fact that the chapters of the
book’s main section were more or less organized by genus (baboons, chimpanzees,
howlers) testifies to this traditional approach to modelling.
Yet many contributors to the volume refused to be straitjacketed by this scheme
and started to doubt the value of such models based on a single species (or a single
genus). Quite independently from each other, people like Potts, Wrangham, Strum
and Mitchell, Tooby and DeVore and even Susman and Crockett formulated critiques
against this practice and came up with a number of alternatives. The pages of the same
volume which presented some classical single-species models (most notably the one by
Tanner) also contained a multidimensional attack against this long-standing method.49

The weaknesses of referential modelling
The critics elaborated the hint which had come up in the wake of the bonobo
debate, namely, that not just the bonobo, but any single extant primate poses
problems if it is privileged as the best model for hominid evolution. Latimer et
al. (1981: 476) and McHenry (1984: 218) had quoted Darwin’s words from the
Descent of Man: ‘we must not fall into the error of supposing that the early progenitor of the whole Simian stock including man was identical with, or even closely
resembled, any existing ape or monkey.’ Susman (1987: 84), on his turn, made
recourse to Haeckel’s line: ‘no single one of the existing man-like apes is among
the direct ancestors of the human race’.
The most lasting contribution the Kinzey volume made was the distinction
introduced by Tooby and DeVore between referential and conceptual models. In
a referential model, they defined, ‘one real phenomenon is used as a model for
its referent, another real phenomenon that is less amenable to direct study’; conceptual models on the other hand were ‘theories: sets of concepts or variables
that are defined, and whose interrelationships are analytically specified’ (Tooby
and DeVore 1987: 184-5). Referential modelling was the method hitherto favoured in primatology, the whole suite from baboons to bonobos belonging to it.
49 It was at around the same time that Kortlandt (1986) condemned the simplistic assumption of
homology of behaviour present in many chimpanzee models. He decried the lack of an intellectual
tradition in primatology where the exigencies of fieldwork overshadowed in-depth analysis and
extensive literature study.

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Conceptual modelling of the sort comparable to Newtonian mechanics and
Darwinian evolutionism still needed to be done: the study of human origins required a theoretical framework of causally interrelated variables which allowed
new kinds of inferences to be made rather than using one phenomenon to uncritically ‘explain’ another. Tooby and DeVore started to develop the principles of such
a framework, based on evolutionary and sociobiological theory which sees the
genes as the unit of selection and animals as strategists promoting their inclusive
fitness. This sociobiological approach had already been outlined by others (most
notably Wilson), but Tooby and DeVore were the first to draw its implications
for primate modelling. With conceptual modelling, Irven DeVore came full circle
with his earlier work: once an originator of the first primate model based on socioecology, he now designed a way to move beyond this very practice by drawing
upon sociobiology (Kinzey 1987: xv).
The distinction between referential and conceptual modelling was not totally unlike the one between formal and relational analogies which Alison Wylie
(1985) introduced in the ethnoarchaeological debate at the same time. Despite
their different ambitions (Tooby and DeVore desired to build a general theory of
evolution, Wylie just wanted to improve the quality of ethnoarchaeological analogies), their basic concepts show considerable overlap. Referential models were like
formal analogies which gave little consideration to notions of relevance, whereas
conceptual models were like relational analogies that tried to work from causal
connections between specific elements of the model towards testable inferences.
‘Referential modelling’ has since become the term to indicate all primate models
we have encountered thus far and it was at these that the critics of the Kinzey volume aimed their arrows.
A first and often made point was that referential models might be all well
and good but that they could not account for unique human characteristics. How
could the baboon, the chimpanzee or the bonobo reveal anything significant about
a species which had eventually developed language, bipedalism, complex tool-use
and many other traits? ‘Only uniquenesses can explain uniqueness,’ Tooby and
DeVore (1987: 187) argued, ‘one cannot invoke the features species have in common to explain their differences.’ Their statement echoed Jolly’s (1970: 9) warning that it was illogical to invoke the behaviour of a living species for explaining
something that this species itself had not developed. There was a general sense
that early hominid behaviour might have been very different from what we see
among extant anthropoids. Assuming, like many previous modellers had done,
that it was most likely similar to one single species in order to defend that species
as a referential model is turning the whole issue around: we precisely want to learn
what that behaviour was rather than assuming how it might have been! A priori
assumptions about early hominid behaviour cannot be used in an argument to unveil that behaviour—this is committing the classical fallacy of the petitio principii
or circular reasoning. Agnosticism about early hominid behaviour is often a better
starting point than apriorism. Wrangham (1987: 51), therefore, found referential
models restricted by their initial assumption:

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they assume that the social organization of human ancestors was similar to that of
a living species. Possibly it was. But it is much more likely that for several million
years our ancestors have had forms of social organization not seen in species living
today. This means that even “the best available model” (Tanner, 1981) may not
be good enough.

Richard Potts, too, repeatedly pointed to this ‘problem of behavioral uniqueness’
(in line with his stone-cache model which was not based on primatological or ethnographic parallels as an alternative to Isaac’s !Kung-inspired home-base model).
Providing the reader with a cautionary tale, he wondered whether we would be
able to reconstruct the unique socioecology of hamadryas baboons on the basis of other extant baboons. The answer was of course no—which supported his
view that unique features ‘may be masked by supposedly plausible reconstructions
based on other primates’ (Potts 1987: 45). Even if early hominids are not conflated with chimpanzees, but placed along a chimp-human continuum, this still
‘precludes considering unique adaptations of that continuum’ (Potts 1987: 34).
Such a ‘Piltdown approach’ to behavioural ecology (Tooby and DeVore 1987:
203) presents hominids as a mixture of living ape and human traits, ‘as a corridor, where chimpanzees enter at one end and modern hunter-gatherers exit at the
other’ (Tooby and DeVore 1987: 203). In this sense, nothing has changed (apart
from the species analogue) since Washburn suggested in the early sixties to see human evolution as the transition from a baboon to a modern hunter-gatherer.
Secondly, the critics agreed that there was no criterion for selecting a good
source analogue. ‘The usual rationales for selecting modern primate analogues for
the behavior of other primates, including early hominids, are not reliable,’ Potts
wrote (1987: 45). Tooby and DeVore (1987: 186) named these models arbitrary
‘because there is no validated principle to govern the selection of an appropriate
living species as a referential model’. Depending on the model one advocated,
ecological analogy, subsistence analogy or phylogenetic homology were all put
forward as the relevant criteria for making a choice. In the absence of consensus
on such criteria, ‘analogies are often based on assumed or superficial resemblances’
(Potts 1987: 43). Similarity has become the sole yardstick, regardless of its genuine relevance. The argument devolves into some sort of ‘adaptive reasoning’ (Potts
1987: 34), i.e. reasoning which fits the source, but which is ultimately unverifiable. As a consequence, referential models come up with reconstructions which
might seem possible but which never move beyond that stage. Possibility does not
entail probability.
What the above critique came down to was the necessity to give consideration
to the notion of relevance in modelling (and this is where the authors sided with
Wylie). Tooby and DeVore were very explicit about this. Two species are always
similar in some respects and different in others—no species is another—yet what
is needed, according to them, is ‘a validated principle’ to determine what is important and what is not:

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The question of which parts of the model are relevant (that is, display patterns
of covariance) is usually not well specified, but left implicit, vague or intuitive.
Consequently, there is no standard by which one can evaluate the large literature
that discusses various species, and, at the preference of the author, asserts that
hominids “probably” were like baboons, bonobos, or whatever, because they share
some trait or other. (Tooby and DeVore 1987: 186)

Remark how they define relevance in terms of ‘patterns of covariance’, which is
nothing else than causality within the source analogue. Rather than enumerating
similarities, they wanted to see a distinction between relevant and irrelevant similarities, between causally connected aspects of the source and incidentally present
aspects, between observed similarities and inferred similarities. They wanted to
move from a projection of the source on the target to a procedure for moving between the two.
If there was no criterion to assess the relevance of similarity, there was certainly none to deal with dissimilarity. This ‘absence of any legitimate method for
handling known differences between hominids and proposed referential model
species’ had two ‘unfortunate effects’ (Tooby and DeVore 1987: 187): firstly, referential models could only be used for periods when the difference between source
species and target species was thought to be minimal, i.e. the oldest periods; secondly, similarities were emphasized at the expense of differences. Since no distinction was made between relevant and irrelevant dissimilarities, all dissimilarity was
seen as threatening the model and had therefore to be limited, either by minimizing the distance between source and target or by neglecting difference. The
critique by Tooby and DeVore was implicitly directed at both chimp models: the
chimpanzee model only worked for ancestral hominids, the bonobo model only
for the last common ancestor and, as we have seen, they both over-stressed similarities at the expense of differences.
A third and more straightforward critique dealt with the poor concern for
testing the primate model against the evidence from geology, archaeology and
palaeoanthropology. For someone like the Palaeolithic archaeologist Potts, it was
inconceivable to speculate on hominization without taking into account the archaeological evidence from the Plio-Pleistocene. Especially the problem of unique
human adaptations could ‘only be resolved by the paleontological record’ (Susman
1987: 86). Referential models contained too much primatology and too little
archaeology and geology. Although Tanner and Zihlman did incorporate a good
deal of fossil and Palaeolithic evidence in their model, it is true that most referential modellers worked more on the source side of the analogy than on the
target. Fruitful dialogue between primatologists and archaeologists or palaeoanthropologists was, and still is, rare, amounting to the impression that it is mostly
primatologists talking to primatologists and palaeoanthropologists to palaeoanthropologists (Chapter 5).
Even if all the above problems could be coped with, referential modelling
would still be theoretically problematic. This was the fourth critique. Strum
and Mitchell (1987: 90) who were invited to the volume to write on baboons

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questioned the very idea of a best model: ‘if all primates, in fact, all animals, can
be understood in the same evolutionary terms, the concept of a “best” model
must be faulty.’ A species’ behaviour was a highly complex adaptation to its environment, based on its own phylogenetic baggage, so that no one could simply
serve as a model for another. The problems with referential models were not just
of a practical sort but quite fundamental, which is reflected in the words of all
critics: ‘there is no single primate species which serves as an appropriate socioecological analogue’ (Potts 1987: 47); ‘even “the best available model” (Tanner,
1981) may not be good enough’ (Wrangham 1987: 51); ‘the “model” I accept as
the most likely representative of the earliest hominids by definition is a composite one’ (Susman 1987: 85); ‘simple analogies and direct comparisons between
any one primate species and early hominids should be abandoned’ (Strum and
Mitchell 1987: 103); ‘the use of the referential approach should be discarded’
(Tooby and DeVore 1987: 188); ‘paleoanthropologists must be prepared to discard prime mover and single-primate-species models of human evolution’ (Tooby
and DeVore 1987: 236-7).
Reading through these severe objections, one can wonder if there was still any
value in looking at extant primates at all for understanding early hominids. In
fact, most authors believed there was. It served at least a truly heuristic purpose:
rather than looking for definite answers, understanding living primates might at
least lead to ‘productive questions’ (Wrangham 1987: 71) or ‘intelligent questions’
(Strum and Mitchell 1987: 95). It could also generate ‘testable hypotheses’ which
had to be confronted with the archaeological record (Potts 1987: 43). Models
should not be used for ‘projections’ but as ‘analytical tools’ (Dunbar 1989: 239).
Heuristic value meant new questions, not an excuse for downright projections. In
general, the view was shared that one needed to go beyond superficial similarities:
‘superficial similarities between early hominids and living primates [were] de-emphasized’ (Potts 1987: 47) in order to gain a genuine understanding of ‘processes
and principles’ which ‘represent the only valid starting place for evolutionary reconstruction’ (Strum and Mitchell 1987: 103). Crockett (1987: 132) similarly
refused to see howlers as models for hominids but sought ‘the application of larger
principles of evolutionary theory’. Potts (1987: 44), in line with the Binfordian
processual archaeology, said: ‘The emphasis is here on process, not static analogies.’ Processes, principles—it is remarkable how often these words appear in the
critical chapters of the Kinzey volume. No matter how vague sometimes, it shows
the desire to substitute an over-reliance on similarity between source and target to
an understanding of the dynamic processes within the source itself. A fruitful use
of a source analogue requires first an adequate understanding of that source itself,
i.e. an understanding of the causal patterns between the elements of the source.
There is a clear parallel here with Binford’s decision to go and study the Nunamiut
(Chapter 3). Also frustrated by the ethnographic analogy of his time, he first
wanted to understand the relationship between statics and dynamics in a present
context (very much in line with the requirements of Wylie’s relational analogy).
Understanding the internal dynamics of the source was to him a necessary prerequisite before the actual use of an analogy. It was necessary but not sufficient:

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we have seen that the use of Nunamiut data in a Palaeolithic context remained
problematic. The same holds true for Strum and Mitchell’s understanding of the
conditions that trigger hunting among baboons or Crockett’s explanation of sexually selected infanticide or female emigration: these are excellent interpretations
of primate behavioural patterns, but they do not tell us how to use them for reconstructing human social evolution. Whereas the horizontal relations of causality started to be elucidated, the vertical relations of attribute transfer remained to
be investigated.
The Kinzey volume was a watershed in the history of primate modelling.
While in many places reminiscent of traditional referential modelling (most notably in the structure of the volume itself ), more than half of the authors raised
objections against this way of working and sought alternative angles of research.
It thus did to primatology what Binford had done to ethnoarchaeology and Boas
to the comparative method: it called for relational understanding by observing a
set of particular present phenomena, detecting relevant processes, isolating causes, and
doing all this before any extrapolation towards the past is made. Apart from the justified but poorly elaborated claims in some articles to understand ‘principles and
processes’, two chapters outlined directions which would become influential in
the years following the book’s publication. They were Wrangham’s proposal for a
phylogenetic comparison and Tooby and DeVore’s outline of a conceptual model
based on behavioural ecology.

Phylogenetic comparison or cladistics of behaviour
In his contribution to Kinzey’s book, Richard Wrangham (1987) distinguished
three ways of using great apes in human origins research: referential modelling,
behavioural ecology and phylogenetic comparison. While the first was to be avoided, the second was much more interesting: behavioural ecology which attempted
to explain animal behaviour in the present (by indicating the causal relationships
between ecology and behaviour based on sociobiological principles as outlined by
Tooby and DeVore) could eventually be used to predict fossil behaviours from a
set of known variables. This was a promising but still tentative angle of research:
Despite the successes and growing importance of behavioral ecology, however, it is
undoubtedly premature to rely on it to “predict” the behavior of fossil species [...]
It may be only a few years before reliable explanations of species differences are
found, but it is misleading to suggest that they have been found yet. The present
state of the art means that attempts to use behavioral ecology to reconstruct hominid behavior are no stronger than those which use chimpanzees or other apes as
models. (Wrangham 1987: 52)

The third option, phylogenetic comparison, offered ‘a quicker, though ultimately
weaker, system for recognizing probable aspects of ancestral social organization’ (52).
It consisted of comparing a list of behavioural patterns in the African apes (gorilla,
chimpanzee and bonobo) and modern humans in order to find shared and derived
character states (figure 20). If a pattern occurred in all four species, it probably had also

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Permission for Open Access publication of this figure was not
granted by the publisher Taylor & Francis. However, the figure is
included in both the printed version of this book as well as the
commercial e-book.

Figure 20. Phylogenetic comparison maps behavioural traits onto the cladogram in order to
determine which character states are ancestral, derived or unique. This one investigates the
original primate social system, which was found to be female kin-based residence (Lee and
Foley 1996: 56)

belonged to the common ancestor they once shared, since it is extremely unlikely that
the same pattern would have been invented independently in the four lineages. This
line of reasoning echoed Zuckerman’s early claim that one had to look for commonalities between all the great apes. It also came close to Lubbock’s quest for a common
denominator between a variety of present source analogues. According to Wrangham,
the aim was ‘to distinguish between aspects of hominoid social organization which are
shared, and therefore phylogenetically conservative, and those which are variable’ (52).
Shared primitive behaviours were ancestral to the common stock; shared derived behaviours had occurred later in a specific subgroup; and unique behaviours had evolved
in only one particular species. Behaviours thus attributed to the last common ancestor
were by implication also present at later hominid stages in human evolution as they belonged to an ‘ancestral suite’ (53).50 After this theoretical defence, Wrangham compared
50 A very similar method was proposed by Reynolds (1966; 1968) in two isolated and largely forgotten
articles published nearly twenty years before; they dealt with the evolutionary origin of open groups
and kinship recognition.

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the grouping patterns, the female, male, sexual and intergroup relationships of African
apes and modern hunter-gatherers and found that the chimp-human common ancestor was ‘implied to have closed social networks, hostile and male-dominated intergroup
relationships with stalk-and-attack interactions, female exogamy and no alliance bonds
between females, and males having sexual relationships with more than one female’
(68). He stressed that this method was superior to referential modelling because it relied
on several species, did not use them as models, allowed the common ancestor to have
unique features and avoided criteria of unknown importance like hunting or savannahdwelling. The weaknesses, he admitted, were that it considered only a limited repertoire
of behaviours, neglected the importance of ecology and made no use of archaeological
and palaeontological information.
Heavily drawing upon Wrangham’s work, Ghiglieri (1987; 1989) and Cameron
(1993) presented emendations to his original phylogenetic comparison. Ghiglieri omitted gorillas from the comparison, keeping chimpanzees, bonobos and humans in it, so
that more shared variables could be found for a more recent ancestor: not the common
ancestor on the hominid-pongid split ca. 8 Myr ago, but the last common ancestor
before the chimpanzee-human split ca. 4 Myr ago. As a consequence, his probable ancestral suite was expanded to incorporate a set of unique behaviours which had evolved
in the chimpanzee-bonobo-human clade prior to splitting. The key change, according
to Ghiglieri, was the emergence of male retention (also called male endogamy or male
residence, the fact that male offspring remain in their natal social group while the females disperse to other groups). This, he suggested, led to cooperation between male kin
in communal defence of the territory and communal reproductive strategies, ultimately
resulting in a system of polygyny whereby individual males cooperated to enhance their
reproductive success.51 Since male retention and communal breeding strategies which
Ghiglieri observed among chimps, bonobos and even human societies ‘are so extremely
rare among nonhuman primates [...] the chances that each of the most recent three species from the common ape-human stem evolved them independently seem extremely
small’ (Ghiglieri 1987: 347). Ghiglieri went further than Wrangham by considering
more variables for a smaller set of closely-related species. More importantly, rather than
just enumerating shared behaviours, he also provided an explanation for the emergence
of some unusual traits.52
Cameron (1993) followed Wrangham’s procedure but cast it in cladistic terminology: phylogenetic stems were called ‘clades’, splitting events ‘cladogeneses’, ancestral
characters ‘symplesiomorphies’, shared derived characters (characters present in several
species but not in the ancestral stem) ‘synapomorphies’, and uniquely derived characters (only present in one species) ‘autapomorphies’. Though such cladistics of behaviour have grown in importance of late, Cameron’s recipe was not different from
51 One can think here of the alliances between dominant males in the Arnhem chimpanzee group
which were indeed aimed at enhancing sexual access to females and, hence, reproductive success (De
Waal 1982).
52 Following Tooby and DeVore (1987), Ghiglieri also attempted to formulate some explanatory
principles of a conceptual model which moved beyond the mere descriptive conclusions of his
phylogenetic comparison. Yet these ‘if, then’ propositions (dealing with such sociobiological themes
like parental investment, kin selection and reciprocal altruism) were only loosely added at the end
of his paper rather than forming a substantial part of it.

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Wrangham’s: take a number of species, compare them on a set of behavioural variables,
and attribute shared traits to an ancestral stage and derived traits to more recent stages.53
Cameron studied all great apes (gorillas and orangutan were included) and came up
with character complexes for all common ancestors before the four major branching
events (the orang split, the gorilla split, the human-chimpanzee split, the chimpanzeebonobo split). Unlike Ghiglieri, he did not try to explain the development of new trends
because this would ‘merely result in the construction of an ad hoc model’ (Cameron
1993: 405). What he did undertake, however, was evaluating archaeological theories on
early hominids on the basis of the character complex he had defined for the last common ancestor before the chimpanzee-human split. Isaac’s home-base theory, Binford’s
scavenging hypothesis and Potts’ stone-cache model were compared with the results of
his cladistic analysis of living primates. Scavenging was unlikely in his view because it
implied that the incipient hunting in the last common ancestor should have been lost
and reinvented afterwards. Stone-caching was only known from the chimpanzees in the
Taï forest (Ivory Coast) which implies that it should have been lost by all other chimpanzee communities and bonobos.54 Although he ultimately favoured Isaac’s theory as
‘the most likely behavioral scenario for the early hominids’, this conclusion (which can
be criticized for a number of reasons) is perhaps less important than the gratifying fact
that primatological modelling and archaeological hypotheses were finally confronted.
Phylogenetic comparison (or ‘cladistics of behaviour’ to use the more recent term) is
a straightforward method to gain an appreciation of the ‘phylogenetic baggage’ present
in a common ancestor. It has the important advantage of not being confined to a single
species. This explains why in recent years the method has become standard practice in
much primatology: McGrew (1992: 40-64) used it to find out the origins of great ape
tool use and the capacities for it in early hominids; Fruth and Hohmann (1996) did the
same for nest-building competence (cf. Kappeler 1998 for a more elaborate assessment).
However, there were certain important flaws to it. The method assumes that shared
traits are by definition ancestral traits, apparently forgetting that similarity can also be
caused by convergence. What holds for the wings of the bat and the fly may also hold
for behaviour: comparable traits do not always need to be homologous but may be simply analogous.55 Another disadvantage is that only conservative traits can be detected,
i.e. traits shared by all species and therefore assumed to belong to the common ancestor.
Innovative traits in the human lineage cannot be known by this approach, nor unique

53 Cladistic analysis results into a cladogram, i.e. the most parsimonious dendrogram needed to represent differences and similarities between taxa. Strictly speaking, such cladogram has no chronological dimension—it is just a visual rendition of the degree of affinity between species. Nevertheless,
it is often believed to represent a phylogenetic tree—Cameron is no exception in making this
assumption.
54 This critique is not entirely fair because Potts precisely tried to formulate an hypothesis quite independent from ethnographic and primatological parallels. Saying that it is unlikely because it is so
unique does not do respect to Potts’ interest for uniquely human features. Cladistic analysis allows
to detect unique features but only if they have survived to the present day; unique features which
have been lost in the meantime cannot be known and are said to be unlikely.
55 Phylogenetic comparison shares the same basic assumption as structuralist historiography, i.e.
the seductive but unsubstantiated idea that similarity between occurrences implies underlying
continuity.

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characters which have not survived until the present day.56 Phylogenetic comparison is
supposed to tell what the situation was before hominization started, not how hominization eventually developed. A final flaw of the method was that its sole focus on phylogeny left ecology out of consideration. Behavioural ecology did the exact opposite.

Behavioural ecology
When Tooby and DeVore compiled their list of principles for conceptual modelling,
one of the main sources of inspiration apart from sociobiology and evolutionary theory
was behavioural ecology, the currently popular attempt to explain the uniquenesses of
an animal’s behaviour from ecological variables. At first sight this seems quite similar to
the socioecology of the 1960s (cf. Crook and Gartlan 1966), but there are important
differences. Firstly, whereas socioecology drew a one-to-one relationship between environmental context (understood as predator pressure and the availability and dispersion
of food) and a type of social organization (Richard 1981), behavioural ecology is less
rigid, less typological and prefers dynamic feedback systems with multiple variables over
unilinear, causal relations (Dunbar 1989): ‘there is no one-to-one correspondence between traits and selection pressures’ (Tooby and DeVore 1987: 191). Secondly, whereas
1960s socioecology considered the group as the level at which selective pressures were
most at work (simply because the group was taken as the unit of analysis, cf. Ghiglieri
1987: 322), behavioural ecology believes that ‘selection acts at the level of the gene’
(Tooby and DeVore 1987: 189).57 Behavioural patterns are not explained in terms of the
benefits they accord to the group but in terms of the individual’s reproductive success
and its genetic contribution to subsequent generations. If ‘group survival’ was the key
to understanding primate behaviour in the socioecological paradigm, ‘inclusive fitness’
was the central notion for behavioural ecologists.58 Inspired by game theory, individual
animals were seen as strategic actors maximizing their own genetic potential in the given
ecological and social context ‘rather than inflexibly committed to the same behavior’

56 Of course, uniquely derived characters of the human lineage can be ascertained (they are simply
the ones not shared by any other species) but Cameron rightly states that it would be tautological
to use these to explain hominization, that is to explain their own emergence: ‘The uniquely derived
behavioral characters of extant human groups cannot be used to explain the behavior of the earliest hominids, just as an analogy based on contemporary chimpanzee populations cannot explain
what the early Pliocene hominids were doing 4 million years ago’ (Cameron 1993: 408). Human
language, for instance, cannot be used to explain hominization. However, Dunbar (1997) compared
grooming activities as related to group size and concluded that human speech emerged at the point
that the size of communities went beyond a normal grooming capacity. Observng a close relationship between the size of the neo-cortex and the size of social groups among primates, he reasoned
that speech emerged as a verbalized form of grooming in bigger groups, and that gossiping, i.e. the
exchange of information on social affiliation, was its predominant function (as grooming is supposed
to do among the great apes). Dunbar thus started from a shared phylogenetic basis (grooming) but
by invoking the variables of group size and neo-cortex size he could account for a unique human
feature (speech).
57 More recent forms of socioecology, however, avoid the pitfall of group selectionism (cf. Smuts et al.
1986).
58 Ghiglieri (1987: 322) phrases it very sharply: ‘rather than being units of natural selection, social
groups are ultimately the evolutionary consequences of individual adaptations, or strategies both to
survive and to increase reproductive success by being social.’

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(Tooby and DeVore 1987: 191). Tooby and DeVore developed the theoretical outline
of such an approach, Wrangham saw it as promising but still in its infancy, but it was C.
Owen Lovejoy who had already presented the first elaborate case of such reasoning.
In an often cited article published in Science, Lovejoy (1981) drew a picture of human evolution following the premises of behavioural ecology and sociobiology. At the
outset, there was the basic assumption that evolution would strongly favour ‘any behavioural change that increases reproductive rate, survivorship or both’ (Lovejoy 1981:
344). He noted that among chimpanzees infant mortality was high due to the requirement of mother-infant mobility in subsistence activities. This mobility was also the
principal restriction on birth spacing. If chimpanzee mothers would not need to travel
with their young offspring, more infants would survive and births could be more frequent, so that survivorship and reproductive rate would increase. This was very much
the ‘demographic dilemma’ (347) also faced by early hominids. Whereas chimpanzees
stuck to their fragile solution, early hominids developed an alternative and ultimately
more successful solution: females with offspring could stay at one place if they and their
infants were provisioned by food-gathering males. For a male this would be a sensible
thing to do if he was certain that the female’s offspring was also his: in that case, his
efforts were no blind altruism but a way to promote the survival of his own genes. In
other words, such form of male provisioning (or more in general, increased male parental investment) would only work if it evolved simultaneously with monogamous pair
bonding between the sexual partners. This, Lovejoy held, was the behavioural base from
which hominization started and he went on to argue that bipedalism, loss of sexual
dimorphism, unique human epigamic features, and even the distribution of hominids
over the world were the consequences, not the causes, of increased male parental investment and monogamous pair bonding.59
Lovejoy’s evolutionary scenario received criticisms from several angles (cf. the
discussion in Science 1982: 295-306). Wrangham with his reserved enthusiasm
about behavioural ecology regretted that ‘even Lovejoy’s scheme, which is the most
elaborate to date, is riddled with speculation’ (Wrangham 1987: 52). Feminists,
not surprisingly, strongly disliked the minor role bestowed to women in this view
of human evolution (Zihlman 1985; Fedigan 1986). Zihlman (1985: 374) named
it a ‘used vehicle, propelled by outworn but retreaded notions’ which at one stroke
‘rehabilitated Man the Hunter but by co-opting Woman the Gatherer: now it’s
Man the Gatherer, and Woman the Gene Receptacle is relegated to utter passivity.’
For our analysis, however, it is more important to see the limited attention given
to phylogenetic issues in Lovejoy’s argumentation. Although chimpanzees function as a heuristic source, there is no consideration for the ancestral traits present
in the early hominid. Lovejoy reasons from ecological conditions (food distribution, nature of food resources, required subsistence mobility) and life-history
parameters (infant mortality, birth intervals, infant dependency and longevity).
The particular nature of this ecological emphasis becomes clear when we contrast
59 Lovejoy was not the only one to work on such issues. Around the time of his influential article in
Science, other sociobiologists discussed the evolutionary relationships of adaptations like paternal
investment, concealed ovulation, menstrual synchrony and primate monogamy (Alexander and
Noonan 1979; Benshoof and Thornhill 1979; Turke 1984).

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Lovejoy’s conclusions with the ones reached by Ghiglieri: whereas Ghiglieri’s phylogenetic comparison had shown polygyny to be the ancestral trait, Lovejoy’s behavioural ecology held that monogamy was the key feature for the same period.
Male kin bonding with Ghiglieri had now become monogamous pair bonding
with Lovejoy! This remarkable divergence was largely due to the methods used:
phylogenetic comparison describes similarities between species; behavioural ecology explains differences between them. The first looks for conservative traits in
the ancestral phylogeny of a species; the second for innovative traits induced by
ecological and sociobiological factors. Typically, the first presents a list of shared
traits whereas the second comes up with a narrative scenario. With conclusions so
diametrically opposed, one wonders whether there was any notion of consensus
in sight.
The most successful attempt to integrate behavioural ecology and phylogenetic comparison to date can be found in the work of Robert Foley and Phyllis Lee
who held that ‘while social states are partially constrained by phylogeny, they are
also strongly influenced by immediate costs and benefits, and therefore can be analysed in terms of the principles of behavioural ecology’ (Foley and Lee 1996: 54).
Their 1989 Science article (but see Foley and Lee 1996 for a more extended argument) started with a list of previous models for the evolution of hominid social
behaviour. Frustrated by this bewildering amount of conflicting interpretations,
they provided an ingenious argument to limit the number of possible explanations. Firstly, they argued, the variety of social strategies is limited: if you see that
the males and the females of any species have four basic social options (being solitary, associating with kin, with non-kin or with extended kin), the combination
of both shows that no more than sixteen social strategies can be possible. Even
admitting that each of these strategies can be stable or transitory does not bring
the number above 32 potential options. (The 1996 paper leaves out the category
of extended kin which reduces the number to 18). Secondly, not only the number
of social states is finite, the number of viable evolutionary pathways from one state
to another also is. A social system based on stable alliances between non-related
males (as with the baboons) cannot evolve into a totally different chimpanzee-like
sociality with kin-related males and nonkin-related females without losing evolutionary fitness. Thirdly, constraints on the evolutionary pathway are not only
determined by the distance between two social systems, but also by the ecological
context in which the evolving species lives. Social evolution is thus limited by a
finite number of options, by phylogenetic constraints on the possible evolutionary
pathways and by ecological constraints in which evolution takes place. Foley and
Lee repeatedly stressed that phylogeny and ecology complemented each other:
any evolutionary change is the outcome of the interaction between novel selective
pressures and the existing structure of behaviour. Evolutionary change is therefore
not just a product of a new environment, but of how the existing structures interact with the new environment. (1996: 53)

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To understand human sociality, they started with a cladistic phylogeny of Old
World primates in order to identify ‘the most probable social characteristics at the
various branching points that have occurred in the evolution of the Hominoidea’
(1996: 55; cf. figure 20). This showed that male residence (combined with female
dispersal) and male kin-bonding was a typical innovation in the African ape/hominid clade (contra Ghiglieri who believed that this pattern only evolved in the
chimpanzee/human clade). Though this conclusion was ultimately based on living species, Foley and Lee stressed that ‘it is not individual species that are being
used to determine the ancestral state (in the form of an analogue model), but the
overall pattern of variability’ (1996: 57). They then went on to study how these
ancestral states interacted with the selective conditions posed by new environments. Their interpretation of the earliest hominid social structure as consisting
of ‘mixed sex groups, with males linked by a network of kinship’ eventually built
‘the selective pressures of open tropical environments onto the social state of the
evolving African hominoids’ (1989: 904).
Though their eventual interpretations are not always original nor entirely devoid of speculation, the importance of Foley and Lee’s work lies first and foremost
in the combination of a phylogenetic approach with an interest in behavioural
ecology. They thus escaped several of the criticisms from the Kinzey volume: they
explicitly refused to draw upon single-species models but used a phylogenetic
comparison instead, they sought for explanatory principles based on behavioural
ecology and life-history theory, and they accounted for unique patterns in the
hominid clade. Although this model made considerable use of fossil evidence and
palaeoecology, the concern for the archaeological record was rather poor—a flaw
also present in Wrangham’s and Tooby and DeVore’s work. In this sense, the final
critique of the Kinzey volume was still left open for correction. Ethoarchaeology
was an attempt to solve this problem.

Ethoarchaeology
A former student of the late Glynn Isaac, Jeanne Sept (1992) questioned whether
the accumulations of stone and bone débris on Plio-Pleistocene sites in EastAfrica were really reflections of early hominid home-base activities. Isaac’s homebase theory had led to much controversy (with criticism coming from Binford
and notably Isaac himself ), but the way Sept approached it was rather original:
by looking at chimpanzees. Isaac had devoted his life-work to the study of early
land use patterns, but he was wary of the use of external sources, believing that
the archaeological and palaeoanthropological record still constituted ‘the most
powerful clue we have to the beginnings of the human evolution’ (1981: 152).
Nevertheless, he suggested that certain accumulations of material might misleadingly look like home-bases. This would have been the case, for instance, with
repeated individual feeding in the shade of long-lived tree. Sept decided to work
out this hypothesis. She studied chimpanzee nesting sites along the Ishasha River
in Congo (then Zaire) and noted that over the course of several years certain trees
were re-used as favourite sleeping places (figure 21). Although these trees did not
function as fixed home bases, their re-use resulted in an accumulation of physical

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Figure 21. Ethoarchaeology as undertaken by Sept has a cautionary function. It shows how
certain trees in a chimpanzee territory may be revisited over the years as nests, thus resulting
in an accumulation of débris without ever being used as homebases (Sept 1992: figure 4)

residues like nests, feeding debris and faeces. Rather than permanently occupied
locales in a central-place foraging economy, these trees were like ‘Hilton hotels’
which attracted ephemeral residents and produced accumulations of material residue. Sept’s analysis did not mean to tell ‘that early hominids had chimpanzeelike ranging or subsistence behavior’ (196) but that activities very different from
home-base behaviour could produce a similar home base-like material record. In
the end, her cautionary tale focused on the problem of equifinality, or the problem that the same result might have been caused by a very different process (Sept
1998). The question why chimpanzees re-used certain places was, however, left
open. Sept just suggested that it might have to do with fruit density and canopy
height, but also inter- and intraspecific food competition, territoriality, predation
risk and mental mapping.
At the very heart, Sept’s work was an actualistic or middle-range research which
tried to see the formation processes between causal dynamics and material statics
at work in a present-day context. She undertook ethological fieldwork with an
explicitly archaeological research question in mind; a motivation very comparable
to the ethnographic turn many archaeologists took in the late 1960s. Her ‘ethoarchaeology’ was therefore the simian variant of ethnoarchaeology, it was heavily
indebted to the Binfordian discussion on actualistic research (Chapter 3) and has

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been flanked by some other field studies since (Joulian 1994; 1996). In a more
recent paper, Sept has explicitly drawn the parallel between this sort of ethoarchaeology and the actualistic field studies undertaken by ethnoarchaeologists. She
noted that while primatologists have not documented the spatial and material
correlates of tool use and nesting with the appropriate detail necessary for ethoarchaeological analysis, archaeologists, on the other hand, have long neglected great
ape behaviour and have only recently ‘scratched the surface of the rich repertoire
of artifact use’ (Sept 1998: 89).
Though Sept’s source analogue consisted only of chimpanzees (in contrast to
the many species present in a phylogenetic comparison), she, too, believed that
‘one should not use chimpanzees as simple analogs or “referential models” [...]
for early hominid behavior [...] any more than one should study living huntergatherers as mere vestiges of prehistoric times’ (196). This remark betrays Sept’s
background in archaeology and her familiarity with the ethnoarchaeological discussion on the proper use of analogy. In the discussion which followed her article
in Current Anthropology, she referred to this discussion and especially to Wylie’s
distinction between formal and relational analogy to explain her disavowal of referential modelling. Sept does not look for a ‘best model’ based on the amount of
similarity but seeks ‘organizational relationships among sets of variables relevant
to the formulation of models for prehistoric situations’ (Hutterer, quoted by Sept
1992: 196). Since relevance is considered, not all differences between source and
target are threatening the analogy. Again drawing a parallel with ethnoarchaeology, she states:
In the same way that ethnoarchaeological studies of modern humans who use
metal cooking